Transcript
Hi, my name is Solange Peters. I'm the Head of Medical Oncology in the Thoracic Unit at the University Hospital of Lausanne in Switzerland. I'm also this year and next year the ESMO [European Society for Medical Oncology] President.
It's my pleasure today to discuss with you very briefly about the ESMO World GI Congress, which for the first year as far as I remember, will not be a presential meeting but will be a virtual meeting.
It's quite important to probably discuss this change, which of course is related to the COVID pandemic, but might also be a change which might impact the way we convey information, data in the future at a broader scale in oncology, and maybe in medicine.
What I mean by that is we are all extremely disappointed not to meet, but somehow, there might be some positive aspects in transforming all our meetings into virtual platforms.
First of all, we have had the experience of the ASCO and the AACR—which is by the way ongoing now—meetings, which have shown maybe some positive and aspects.
Let's start with the negatives, so I can end with the positives. The negative aspect is a technical challenge. How to make a virtual event still attractive, being the platform. The platform must really be absolutely impeccable in the way it works, otherwise people lose patience.
But also, in terms of potentially how user-friendly it might be. We were now used to meetings where colorful schemes were visible everywhere just to attract attention, and to go to the right time and the right place. And when you're on the Web, you have to pay attention to the fact that everything looks immediately more complex.
This is about as a challenge of the platform, but also I think what is quite important and has been described as being a negative side of virtual meetings, is how we can pay attention, how long we can pay attention, to any type of virtual situation, discussion, or presentation.
Probably the span of our concentration is likely shorter when you are really behind a screen. It means probably very friendly and functional platforms, and maybe a little more dense kind of content in order to keep the attention.
Most important is probably the fact that we are missing interactions. Whatever we do in the future, even if we conserve some of our meetings being virtual, because it might save the environment, this interaction, meaning that we sit together to discuss, to evoke or adapt, to have all the nuance and all the granularity we need in oncology is really something that we need to maintain somehow.
Is it an oncology week? Is it something different? We need to be able to exchange, and we are missing that.
Positive things, well, you've seen that once you put anything on the virtual platform, suddenly the audience you get is, first of all, so much larger, larger in numbers. People pick the things they need, but these people are way more numerous.
The second thing is way more democratic, because at the time being, most of these access were all for free or just connected to a membership which always is useful anyway for accessing lots of materials.
Really increasing the democratic side of this thing, and we have been showing it. The geographical distribution of the attendees on the virtual platform suddenly encompasses countries which usually we're not representing in the face-to-face meetings.
There are positive kind of visibility, accessibility to information aspects that I would really, really promote in the future.
So World GI, I'm sure, will have exactly the same numbers, showing that way more people will be connected. Of course, probably being able to convey, discuss information beyond the usual borders of our meetings.
What will happen with geography? What will be an American society, as compared to a European society?
The future will tell us, and probably, we will work and live in a hybrid environment in the future, hoping that COVID is leaving, allowing again to define some priorities. That's about the virtual format we have been seeing at AACR, we've been seeing at ASCO… The ESMO meetings, the annual meeting will also be virtual, and we are trying to take all the experience of the other meetings to shape the ones of ESMO the best it can be.
The World GI is, of course, also, I am not a GI oncologist, but I am the head of medical oncology. I know what my colleagues from GI are waiting for. Of course, they are waiting for lots of data, and one of the hot topics, like in every kind of cancer type, is immunotherapy.
I have seen, and I'm waiting for, more results of immunotherapy in hepato-carcinoma, and probably also in gastric cancer, where really some interesting data are awaited, and I would say probably major advances will be done.
But it's not only about immunotherapy. It's also about targeted therapy. Think about the HER2 pathway, HER2-targeted therapy in gastric cancer. The micro satellite instabilities, BRAF mutant subgroups in colorectal cancer. All these data will help us shape what we call procedural oncology in GI malignancy.
Last, but not least, I am excited to see that some advances happen in pancreatic cancer, where we are now discussing the neoadjuvant potential for chemotherapy in this very difficult disease.
That's really a disease in which the unmet need is defined. I think here major advances are also expected to be presented.
