The Miami Cancer Meeting: An Interview With Luis E. Raez, MD

Eleven years ago, Luis E. Raez, MD, was a professor of oncology at the University of Miami and had founded the lung cancer program at the university. At the time, he and his colleagues recognized the need for a comprehensive cancer conference in Miami. 

“We decided to create a Miami cancer conference — we called it Miami Cancer Conference at the time — to create an opportunity to gather medical oncologists, surgical oncologists, oncology fellows, and radiation clinicians to interact and discuss the latest developments in cancer care every year,” says Raez.

Now the conference is called the Miami Cancer Meeting, and since the time of the first meeting, Raez has become director of the Memorial Cancer Institute in Broward County, Florida. Faculty members for the meeting come from both the Memorial Cancer Institute and the University of Miami and from other nationally recognized cancer centers such as Moffit, Harvard, and MD Anderson.

The Miami Cancer Meeting is a 2-day course designed for medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, surgical oncologists, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, oncology nurses, registered pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, and radiation therapists. 

Topics that the conference covers include solid tumors and hematology focusing on breast cancer, gastrointestinal malignancies, head and neck cancers, hematological malignancies, genitourinary cancers, brain tumors, malignant melanoma, and non-small-cell lung cancer. The conference also offers sessions on supportive care, with emphasis on bone metastasis and hypercalcemia, and management of chemotherapy-related side effects.

The meeting typically hosts about 200 attendees, including attendees from the United States and an international attendance from Latin America, Mexico, and Europe. Meeting attendees have the benefit of learning from colleagues from other countries.

“We also have international speakers from Europe and Latin America who support the conference every year,” says Raez.

In the past several years, the Miami Cancer Meeting has begun including content on interventional oncology. 

“Interventional oncology is becoming very important -- we do a lot of interventional procedures today,” says Raez. At the Memorial Cancer Institute, Raez and his oncology colleagues treat lung cancer using radiofrequency ablation (RFA), liver metastases with localized yttrium-90 radiation, and various cancer types with embolization. They place fiducials all over the body for stereotactic radiation. 

“Interventional radiology is much more than just biopsies like it used to be 30 or 40 years ago. We do a lot of therapeutic approaches within interventional radiology nowadays,” says Raez. Treatment of cancer patients is multispecialty, Raez adds. 

“The interventional radiologist is part of the team now so in our weekly tumor boards, in most of our cancer centers, we have interventional radiologists with us,” says Raez. “I have an interventional radiologist sitting in my lung cancer tumor board at The Memorial Cancer Institute because we need interventional radiologists to do fiducials, radiofrequency ablations, and biopsies. We discuss the multidisciplinary care of the patient as a group of experts.”

The next Miami Cancer Meeting, which will be held January 24 to 25, 2015, will provide content useful to interventional radiologists and all clinicians involved in interventional oncology. Raez points out that there will be discussion of the relatively new concept in oncology called treatment of oligometastatic disease. With this therapy, if a patient has fewer than 3 or 4 metastases, local interventions from interventional radiology can enable the patient to stay on the same systemic or low toxic regimes without need to change systemic treatment. Giving the patient an opportunity to keep the same regime can greatly improve outcomes, especially if it is a well-tolerated, nontoxic regime that is giving patients a good quality of life. Raez explains that oncologists are studying this approach to therapy to determine whether this therapy can prolong patients’ lives.

“The meeting keeps growing, with an international attendance, which tells us that we’re providing content that attendees want,” says Raez. 

Editor’s note: Dr. Raez reports no disclosures related to the content herein. 

Suggested citation: Ford J. The Miami Cancer Meeting: An interview With Luis E. Raez, MD. Intervent Onc 360. 2014;2(7):E61-E62.