ASCO President Defines Annual Goals of Cancer Organization

On the heels of its annual meeting, ASCO president Robin Zon outlines the organization's goals, including the use of AI in cancer treatment.
https://www.webmd.com/cancer/cancer-i...

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JOHN WHYTE Welcome, everyone, to Cancer in Context. I'm Dr. John Whyte. I'm the Chief Medical Officer at WebMD. There certainly have been a lot of advancements in cancer treatment and diagnosis over the past year. But what do people really need to understand? And let's be honest, workloads have become more intense. Are we still talking burnout, and what do we need to do?

Joining me today is the President of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Dr. Robin Zon. Robin, thanks for joining me today.

ROBIN ZON Thank you so much, Dr. Whyte, and it's a pleasure to be here.

JOHN WHYTE As you may know, I worked at the food and drug administration prior to coming to WebMD and Medscape, and I was always fascinated by the number of new drugs in cancer that we see every year. So I wanted to get your thoughts. You know, what have been the latest advances that you've seen are really changing how we practice oncology?

ROBIN ZON Well, I'm going to rephrase that about what are we actually going to be seeing at ASCO this year? And just as a review, the ASCO Annual Meeting is where our cancer specialists will hear the latest in groundbreaking oncology treatment and patient care. And in fact, there's over 5,000 research abstracts that will be presented. And there's a few themes I'd like to share with you that come to mind.

First is improving outcomes with less toxicity. And this is a trend that we've been seeing across a number of cancer types, and it really informs us on how we can use existing treatments better but with less side effects. Certainly, in taking care of patients on a daily basis, we're always trying to find ways to optimally get the effectiveness but at the same time reduce the toxicity, so they remain compliant with our medications.

So we have several studies that are looking at the role of de-escalating treatment while improving outcomes, as well as how can we sequence treatments that the resulting outcomes can then allow us to further personalize the treatment, and in some cases, omit or change the therapy because the treatment didn't work as well as it should have, or the treatment worked so well that we don't need to continue any treatment after the outcome?

So tech innovation is also a very highlighted area that you'll see in our meeting. And several studies and special sessions are focusing on the new uses of technology in cancer care. For example, telehealth. We've been using telehealth with the onset of COVID. But now we actually have some abstracts that support its use and effectiveness, for example, in providing effective palliative care.

Artificial intelligence is able to reduce disparities, and we have an abstract that's supporting that in its role in colon cancer screening. Then we have new strategies for sampling of blood to detect what we call minimal residual disease to guide treatment in the area of prevention and early diagnosis. We have studies examining the long term risks of hormone replacement therapy.

And very exciting, especially in my world, is the effectiveness of HPV vaccination for preventing a wide range of cancers among both girls and boys. So there's an abstract that is proving this value, which I think is extremely important. Because as of 2022, only 58.6% of the US adolescents currently aged 13 to 15 years have received the two or three doses of the HPV vaccine as recommended.

And globally, since we are a global organization, where prevention also is very important, just one in eight girls are vaccinated against HPV. And as you know, in many parts of the world, cervical cancer is a primary cancer that could be prevented.

JOHN WHYTE Right. And we see its association with throat and neck cancer as well. So Robin, something I've wanted to ask you and to have a robust discussion around is what are the unique challenges that community oncologists face in clinical practice in terms of keeping up with the emerging data and the new advances?

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