Key Takeaways From 2024 ASCO Breakthrough

Dr. Lillian Siu and Dr. Melvin Chua discuss the new technologies and novel therapeutics that were featured at the 2024 ASCO Breakthrough meeting.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Lillian Siu: Hello and welcome to the ASCO Daily News Podcast. I'm Dr. Lillian Siu, a medical oncologist and director of the Phase 1 Trials Program at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center in Toronto, Canada, and a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. On today's episode, we'll be discussing key takeaways from the 2024 ASCO Breakthrough meeting in Yokohama, Japan. Joining me for this discussion is Dr. Melvin Chua, who served as the chair of Breakthrough’s Program Committee. Dr. Chua is the head of the Department for Head, Neck and Thoracic Cancers in the Division of Radiation Oncology at the National Cancer Center in Singapore.

Our full disclosures are available in the transcript of this episode.

Dr. Chua, it's great to be speaking with you today and congratulations on a very successful Breakthrough meeting.

Dr. Melvin Chua: Thanks Dr. Siu. It was really inspiring to come together again to showcase the innovative work of world-renowned experts, clinicians, researchers, med-tech pioneers, and drug developers from around the globe. Our theme this year was inclusivity and thus it was important to bring people together again in the Asia Pacific region and to foster international collaborations that are so important in advancing cancer care. This year, we invited 65 international faculty, of which 55% were from Asia. Also, importantly, we achieved approximately a 50-50 split for male to female representation. These are remarkable statistics for the meeting, and we really hope to retain this for future Breakthrough [meetings].

Dr. Lillian Siu: The meeting featured renowned keynote speakers who shared great insights on new technologies and therapies that are shaping the future of drug development and care delivery. Let's first talk about artificial intelligence and the keynote address by Dr. Andrew Trister. He gave a very interesting talk titled, “Plaiting the Golden Braid: How Artificial Intelligence Informs the Learning Health System.” What are the key messages from his talk?

Dr. Melvin Chua: Couldn’t agree with you more, Dr. Siu. Dr. Trister is the chief medical and scientific officer of Verily, a precision health company. He previously worked in digital health and AI at The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and worked at Apple where he led clinical research and machine learning with Apple partners. But perhaps it was really his background and training as a radiation oncologist that was most pertinent as he was able to weave both the components of new AI models and the applications and pitfalls in the clinic to the audience.

Dr. Trister provided a very high-level view through the history of AI and showcased the progression of the different AI models and he basically explained between deep and shallow methods as well as deductive logic versus inductive probabilistic methods. He then provided several clinical examples where these models have shown their utility in the clinic, for example, pathology and so forth. At the same time, he illustrated several pitfalls with these models. So overall, I think Dr. Trister's talk was very well received by the audience with several key messages, including the importance of [using] high-quality data as the basis of a good AI model.

AI was also addressed in an Education Session that looked at Artificial Intelligence in the Cancer Clinic. And we had a panel of experts that highlighted current progress and successes with AI in the clinic, advances with AI assisted pathology for clinical research and precision medicine, large language models (LLMs) for applications in the clinic, and how we could leverage AI in precision oncology. And from this session, I had several key takeaways. Dr. Alexander Pearson [of the University of Chicago] gave a very illustrative talk on how multimodal information across clinical omics, radiological information and multi omics could be used to improve diagnostic tasks and clinical prediction across different cancers. And Dr. Joe Yeong [of Singapore General Hospital] gave a very good talk on how AI can be applied in digital pathology to accelerate research in immunology and help in the development of immunotherapies. Dr. Danielle Bitterman [of Brigham and Women’s Hospital] shared very good examples of how LLMs could be used in a clinic. And I think the example that really stood out for me was how LLMs could be deployed to create responses to patient queries. And of course, the big question in the room was: How could AI eventually encapsulate compassion in their response? I think this again showcased how LLMs could really help to accelerate our clinical work going forward. And ultimately circling back to data, Dr. Caroline Chung [of MD Anderson] gave a very poignant description on the importance of data quality and how poor-quality data could eventually lead to underperforming AI models. So all in all, I think this was a great session. And what do you think, Dr. Siu?

Dr. Lillian Siu: Melvin, I totally agree with you. I like all your comments and I really enjoyed the keynote as well as the session on AI in the cancer clinic chaired by Dr. Pearson. I think all these sessions were really informative. Discussions on the latest AI and machine learning, algorithms and technologies on digital pathology, LLMs and big data, as you said, really enables the attendees, especially clinicians like me, to gain a deep understanding of how AI can be translated to practical applications.

Dr. Melvin Chua: Great. So, Dr. Siu, let's talk about some of the novel therapeutics that were featured at the meeting. Again, this was an important session for Breakthrough, and it's always been there. So could you share some highlights from the sessions on novel drug development from your perspective?

Dr. Lillian Siu: Yes, indeed. Drug development is such an exciting aspect of this meeting. On Day 3 of the meeting, we had a keynote by Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University, who discussed “Targeting Regulatory T cells (Tregs) in Cancer: The Science, Trials, and Future.” And he talked about T cells, especially Treg biology, the role of Tregs in immune regulation, new developments in Treg immuno-oncology drugs, and how we can actually target Tregs to treat early cancers, etc. This talk is particularly exciting because there are now anti CCR8 antibodies in the clinic that specifically target Tregs, and some early signals of anti-tumor activities are already being observed. Dr. Sakaguchi also emphasized the importance of combination sequence and timing of drugs for the successful use of cancer immunotherapeutic agents.

I also want to emphasize the Education Session that followed, titled, “The Future of Immunotherapy, New Drugs and New Ideas.” In that particular session, we heard about engineering T-cell immunity to eradicate tumors. We heard about CAR T-cell therapy in GI cancers, novel immunotherapeutic combinations, and T-cell engagers, which are bispecifics in cancer. While success with some of these immunotherapeutic modalities, such as cell therapies and T-cell engagers have been largely seen in hematological malignancies, we are beginning to observe efficacy signals in solid tumors. For example, the CAR T targeting Claudin18.2 in gastrointestinal cancers and the recently approved FDA-approved DLL3/CD3 bispecific T-cell engager, tarlatamab, in small cell lung cancer are really exciting examples.

We also heard from investigators who are exploring neoadjuvant therapies in the neoadjuvant therapy session, and the key takeaway from that session is that we have growing interest in using neoadjuvant therapy or perioperative therapy. In other words, neoadjuvant plus adjuvant therapy in different cancers. In the neoadjuvant session, there were updates provided by different experts on the roles of neoadjuvant therapy in melanoma, liver cancer, bladder cancer, and nasopharyngeal cancer. Increasingly, there is randomized trial evidence to support the use of neoadjuvant therapy or perioperative immunotherapy in several cancer types with survival-based endpoints. Very exciting indeed.

Dr. Melvin Chua: Indeed, I couldn't agree with you more. I think one of the things that went into designing the case-based discussions this year was that we wanted to talk about cancers that were relevant to this part of the world and hence we again showcased lung cancers, gastric cancers and melanomas, and whereby we have again perspectives from an expert from the West coupled to an expert from the East, thereby showcasing the diversity of practice around the world. The other thing that we did this year was we decided to pair the case-based discussions with the keynotes and the Education Sessions as well. For example, on Day 3, we had Dr. Sakaguchi speak on Tregs, as you mentioned. And this was followed by an in-depth session on new immunotherapies, and then followed by a case-based discussion on different melanoma cases on the role of neoadjuvant immunotherapy in this disease, and the strikingly relevance of response to prognostication. This is an important trait that we're seeing now that seems to pan out across different cancers, where we find that neoadjuvant response to combination systemic therapies and/or radiotherapy is a strong prognosticator.

Dr. Lillian Siu: So, Dr. Chua, we've discussed some breakthrough treatments and promising advances in cancer care, and we've touched upon some barriers to success in cancer treatment. I would like to ask you about the keynote address by Dr. Raffaella Casolino of the World Health Organization, who spoke passionately about efforts by the WHO and its partners to build equity in cancer care. Can you share some highlights with us?

Dr. Melvin Chua: Absolutely, Dr. Siu. In spite of the tremendous advances we’ve seen in recent years in oncology, there are still major disparities in cancer care, such as cost and access, which affect patients worldwide. I think Dr. Casolino’s talk was a very nice overview whereby she showed, first of all, the WHO's impact in terms of the WHO Cancer Resolution initiative that was implemented in 2017, where through this initiative, WHO has impacted 100 countries, invested $1 billion in funds, and that has led to millions of lives saved. But she then really drilled down to some of the key examples of the focus of the WHO in terms of equalizing care in cancer. I think one which struck me was the appreciation of the disparities in the clinical trials landscape. I think it is clear that there's still a huge barrier to clinical trials between the high- and middle-income countries and the low- and middle-income countries, and the majority of clinical trials these days are industry sponsored and we really need to look at leveling the playing field in this regard.

Then she highlighted the WHO’s work on trying to lower the barriers to precision oncology. And I think there are several issues in that sense, but I think what the WHO has really worked hard on is promoting education for genomic medicine, where they've done several reviews with experts around the world to educate the field across the world on how we interpret and apply genomics in the clinic.

So all in all, it was very interesting to hear Dr. Casolino’s insights from a policy perspective, and again, this emphasizes that there's so much work to be done at the end of the day and the dialogue needs to continue. We also heard about policy, academic and industry perspectives in the context of clinical trials, and that led to a discussion on real-world evidence generation for regulatory approvals. It was very nice that we had a session on that at the end of Breakthrough 2024 (Real-World Evidence and Clinical Trials: Beyond the Ivory Tower). And in that session, we heard from Dr. Shaalan Beg [of the NIH], and Dr. Janet Dancey [of Queen’s University] who represented views from academia and Dr. Hidetoshi Hayashi [of Kindai University Hospital] shared perspectives on decentralized trials. I’d like to encourage our listeners to watch these sessions if they were unable to attend. The content is very rich, and I'm sure they'll learn from it.

Dr. Lillian Siu: Thank you so much, Dr. Chua. Is there anything else you would like to cover before we wrap up the podcast today?

Dr. Melvin Chua: Thank you, Dr. Siu. The thing I really want to emphasize is, apart from all these Educational Sessions and having very eminent keynote speakers, one of the key points that we really want to bring out for Breakthrough is to showcase the high-quality research. This year we had 300 abstracts submitted and they were all high quality, cutting across trials, omics research, AI and technology, and eventually we selected 235 of them and we were able to showcase some of them across three oral sessions over three days. I think this is an important component of Breakthrough that we really wish to continue building upon where people are now excited to use this forum to present their work.

Dr. Lillian Siu: Thank you so much, Dr. Chua. I really enjoyed our discussions today. I look forward to seeing how the Breakthrough meeting will continue to grow in future years.

Dr. Melvin Chua: Thank you again, Dr. Siu. Thank you for all your leadership and efforts in making Breakthrough a successful meeting series the past few years.

Dr. Lillian Siu: Thank you to our listeners for your time today. You'll find links to the session discussed today in the transcript of this episode. Finally, if you value the insights that you hear on the ASCO Daily News Podcast, please take a moment to rate, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Thank you.

 

Disclaimer:

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

Find out more about today’s speakers: 

 Dr. Lilian Siu 

@lillian_siu 

Dr. Melvin Chua 

@DrMLChua 

 

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Disclosures:  

Dr. Lillian Siu: 

Leadership (Immediate family member): Treadwell Therapeutics 

Stock and Other Ownership Interests (Immediate family member): Agios   

Consulting or Advisory Role: Merck, AstraZeneca/MedImmune, Roche, Voronoi Inc., Oncorus, GSK, Seattle Genetics, Arvinas, Navire, Janpix, Relay Therapeutics, Daiichi Sankyo/UCB Japan, Janssen, Research Funding (Institution): Bristol-Myers Squibb, Genentech/Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bayer, Amgen, Astellas Pharma, Shattuck Labs, Symphogen, Avid, Mirati Therapeutics, Karyopharm Therapeutics, Amgen 

 Dr. Melvin Chua: 

Leadership, Stock and Other Ownership Interests: Digital Life Line 

Honoraria: Janssen Oncology, Varian 

Consulting or Advisory Role: Janssen Oncology, Merck Sharp & Dohme, ImmunoSCAPE, Telix Pharmaceuticals, IQVIA, BeiGene 

Speakers’ Bureau: AstraZeneca, Bayer, Pfizer, Janssen  

Research Funding: PVmed, Decipher Biosciences, EVYD Technology, MVision, BeiGene, EVYD Technology, MVision, BeiGene 

Patents, Royalties, Other Intellectual Property: High Sensitivity Lateral Flow Immunoassay for Detection of Analyte in Samples (10202107837T), Singapore. (Danny Jian Hang Tng, Chua Lee Kiang Melvin, Zhang Yong, Jenny Low, Ooi Eng Eong, Soo Khee Chee)