ASCO Chief Medical Officer Highlights Top Clinical Advances and Nine Research Priorities to Accelerate Progress in New Podcast

Subscribe through iTunes and Google Play.

Welcome to this ASCO in Action podcast. This is ASCO's podcast series where we explore policy and practice issues that can impact oncologists, the entire cancer care delivery team, and those individuals we care for, people with cancer. My name is Clifford Hudis, and I'm the CEO of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

I serve as the host of the ASCO in Action podcast series. And today, I am really pleased to have as my guest Dr. Richard Schilsky. He is ASCO's senior vice president. And chief medical officer, and Rich is here to talk about our new clinical cancer advances report, which was just released. In clinical cancer advances, ASCO identifies the most important clinical research advances of the past year across the full range of cancers, and from prevention to screening to treatment and survivorship.

The report also announces what ASCO has identified as our advance of the year. And for the first time in this year's report, we will debut what we believe are the research priorities with greatest potential to advance progress against cancer. Rich, welcome and thank you for joining me today.

Thanks, Cliff. Great to be back.

now let's start with what we always do. Every year, we announced the advance of the year, the one area of clinical cancer research that has demonstrated the most significant progress in a year's time. And we've seen tremendous progress in the treatment of rare cancers, earning it the 2019 advance of the year recognition. Rich, can you talk about why this area was chosen? Why is this particular line of research so important for individuals with cancer?

Well, first, let me start with a definition of what we mean by rare cancers. And generally, what we're talking about are cancers that are diagnosed with a frequency of less than six cases per 100,000 cancer diagnoses each year. Collectively, though, because there are many kinds of rare cancers, overall rare cancers comprise about 20% of all new cancer diagnoses every year.

But those numbers may not even tell the full story, because as we learn more and more about the molecular subtyping of cancer, what we're learning, of course, is that there are many very, very rare mutations and fusions and other genomic alterations that occur in a very small proportion of even common cancer diagnoses. So the patient with lung cancer, who has a RET fusion that occurs in about 1% of all lung cancer cases, that begins to become a very rare subset, even though it's overall a common disease. So we're going to be dealing more and more with this general area of rare cancers. But the reason that it's so important to single this area out, of course, is because historically, we haven't been able to learn very much about these rare cancers, simply because they are rare. There aren't very many of them that occur each year. Therefore, they're difficult to study. It's difficult to complete clinical trials. It's difficult to find patient samples to be able to understand the underlying biology of these diseases.

And yet, many of them are refractory to standard treatments. Many of them have a very aggressive clinical course. And for patients who are affected by one of these rare cancers, they desperately need new treatments. And this year, we're seeing, for the first time, some real progress being made in a number of these rare cancers. I'll give you some specific examples that we called out in the report. So for example, although thyroid cancer is a very common form of cancer, anaplastic thyroid cancer represents only about 2% of all thyroid cancers. And of those anaplastic thyroid cancers, about 16%-- so now we're talking 16% of 2% have a BRAF mutation. But it's clear now that treatment with BRAF directed therapy produces a very high response rate in this rare group of individuals who have BRAF mutant anaplastic thyroid cancer.

Another example, take the drug we're all familiar with, trastuzumab. We know now, of course, th