Before it even started, ASCO 2020 was one for the books. Held virtually for the first time in its history instead of at Chicago’s massive McCormick Place conference center, the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s big meeting also shrank from five days to three last weekend.
After following ASCO news from afar, STAT’s Adam Feuerstein on Wednesday continued in that vein, hosting a virtual chat with three noted oncologists to get their take on the future of cancer therapy. After big news from AstraZeneca in lung cancer, Johnson & Johnson in multiple myeloma, and Allogene in off-the-shelf gene therapy, they paused to reflect on their field — and ASCO 2021. Here are some of their observations:
What does ‘survival’ mean?
George Demetri, director of the Sarcoma Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, on interpreting trial results: “Oncologists are the only people in the world who think there are different flavors of survival. You know, you can be surviving with cancer. You could be surviving without cancer, but you’re surviving. And so the question of what disease-free survival really means is a higher quality survival. Or does it really translate into people living longer? You say there’s a survival benefit to a patient. And then you qualify it by saying, well, it’s actually just a disease-free survival. They look at you like you’re from Mars.”
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