Axel Grothey, MD, Talks About the Upcoming ESMO World Congress on GI Cancer

Dr Grothey tells us what we can look forward to at the 22nd ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer, which is taking place virtually this year.

Transcript

My name is Axel Grothey. I'm a GI medical oncologist at West Cancer Center in Germantown, Tennessee and the director of GI Cancer Research. 2020, we've seen a complete change in the way we interact, educate ourselves, and actually hold conferences.

One of my favorite conferences every year as a GI oncologist is the meeting in Barcelona, the World GI meeting or ESMO GI meeting, because it's in conjunction with ESMO.

This is the meeting after ASCO where new data being presented, data in a different perspective that came from ASCO, and gives a larger audience coming from Europe, Middle East, and Asia the ability to interact with dedicated GI oncologists on a very high level.

Barcelona by itself, of course, is a great venue and we're missing out on that this year. We are going to experience the World GI Conference in a very different way, with pros and cons.

We've seen this with ASCO, for instance, that several people enjoyed actually being able to tap into the virtual meetings on demand at ESMO, at ASCO, and at AACR, actually, before we start showed very high attendance of these meetings.

We've also have seen that there are ways to make it interactive, because that's really what we like to see, putting the data by the PR that are being presented into perspective allowing the world to interact with the presenters and discussions, etc. There are ways to do this with modern technology.

What can we expect at ESMO GI, World GI in virtual Barcelona? We can expect refinement of molecular profiling of cancers, which I think is really the common theme that we've seen coming over in the last years.

With implication for targeted therapies, predictive factors, prognostic factors, new treatment options for patients in various GI malignancies -- pancreas cancer, gastric cancer, and colorectal cancer.

We will see discussion about the role with immunotherapy in various malignancies with the Holy Grail, of course, trying to make, let's say currently non-immunogenic cancers respond to immunotherapy. There are various combination therapies that are being interrogated, right now, investigated. This is going to be an exciting discussion.

Then the ESMO GI meeting also lives of the interdisciplinary nature of the speakers, of the presenters. We see gastroenterologist. We have geneticists.

We have surgeons, radiation oncologists, and medical oncologists covering the whole portfolio of GI cancers from various different angles, which I think is really important because we need to build a team around every single patient with a GI malignancy.