Conferences | Pharma Strategy Blog

ASCO 2012 Preview – Highlights of key data emerging from Chicago

By MaverickNY on May 15, 2012

It’s that time of the year again where we cogitate and contemplate on what might be hot at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) before the abstracts are available (they’re released online tomorrow at 6pm ET).

This year, while interesting early data from up and coming small biotechs is likely to be eagerly presented in poster sessions, the focus is more likely going to be on big Pharma with various phase III and also late phase II trials that are due to report data. Unfortunately, not all of these will produce overwhelmingly positive results though!

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ASCO 2012 Acronym Mania!

By MaverickNY on May 14, 2012

Many of you will remember PSB reader Dr Al Lalani of Regeneron’s guest blog post around this time last year with a quick summary of the key clinical trials at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting based on the study acronyms, which turned out to be highly popular.

Fortunately, Al has kindly sent in a review of this year’s trials in a very creative fashion, as you can see below (PSB: Thanks, Al!).

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Ribonucleases (RNase) what are they and why are they relevant to cancer?

By MaverickNY on April 30, 2012

At the recent American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting, I had the pleasure of meeting several interesting young scientists and physicians either in the poster halls or in various scientific sessions. It seemed a great idea to encourage some of them to contribute some guess blog posts here on PSB.

AACR 2012 Laura Strong Poster 300x176 Ribonucleases (RNase) what are they and why are they relevant to cancer?

Dr Laura Strong, Photo courtesy of Pieter Droppert, Biotech Strategy Blog

Amongst the people I met was Dr Laura Strong, President and COO of Quintessence Biosciences.

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Highlights of AACR 2012 – Part 3

By MaverickNY on April 23, 2012

Aside from the already published Part 1 and Part 2 blog posts about AACR here on PSB, you can also find some more coverage, including summaries of other topics, on the companion Biotech Strategy Blog, such as the following:

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Highlights of AACR 2012 – Part 1

By MaverickNY on April 17, 2012

The 2012 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting in Chicago was interesting for several reasons. While there were no truly ground breaking data such as in previous years as with, for example:

vemurafenib in BRAFV600E melanoma
vismodegib in basal cell carcinoma (BCC)
crizotinib in ALK+ lung cancer

there were a lot of encouraging signs for the future.

What made the meeting exciting for me was the sheer number of new compounds emerging from late preclinical to early phase I – clearly companies are looking to restock their pipelines with the threat of major patent cliffs imminent. Not everyone is chasing new compounds to license in! The sheer breadth and depth of the pathways targeted by the new compounds took me a little by surprise.

This is a preview of Highlights of AACR 2012 – Part 1. Read the full post

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American Association for Cancer Research Meeting 2012

By MaverickNY on March 31, 2012

Today marks the kick off for one of my favourite conferences on the oncology-hematology calendar, with the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) being held in Chicago. It’s all about the science and basic research here, although there are clinical sessions, usually on strategy and early emerging phase I/II data.

Wifi is usually pretty good at the AACR annual meeting, although it can be more variable at the smaller meetings. Like many attendees, wifi permitting, I’ll be tweeting from the conference and blogging some of the interesting highlights over the next few days.

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Video Report from 2012 European Association of Urology Congress in Paris

By MaverickNY on March 2, 2012

Amazingly, it’s been a year since I started doing conference highlight videos, with the first one rolling out at EAU meeting in Vienna last March. They’ve proven to be much more popular than expected! The good news is that the video recording, production and presentation skills have improved along the way.

Unlike last year, the 2012 EAU Congress wasn’t lit up with excitement about new data (abiraterone and MDV3100 dominated last year). Instead, there were more reflective discussions about how to consider sequencing and combinations in a more crowded castrate resistant prostate cancer market going forward as well as some mention of new up and coming targets outside the androgen receptor (AR) such as ERG and Src.

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Will combining custirsen and MDV3100 reduce resistance in advanced prostate cancer?

By MaverickNY on February 26, 2012

Sights of 2012 EAU Congress

Greetings from the European Association of Urology (EAU) congress in Paris. Despite the grey drizzle typical of Europe in winter, this is actually quite an interesting meeting with lots of poster presentations.

One poster that caught my eye yesterday was from Martin Gleave’s group on clusterin knockdown synergising MDV3100 activity. Previously, we discussed on this blog how inhibiting clusterin with custirsen (OGX-011) potentiated docetaxel. At the AUA meeting last year, the issue of whether the same would happen with MDV3100 was suggested, as you can see in the short video blog.

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The role of the Androgen Receptor in breast cancer

By MaverickNY on February 10, 2012

This week I have been in Orlando for the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Special Conference on prostate cancer chaired by Drs Arul Chinnaiyan (U. of Michigan) and Charles Sawyers (MSKCC). It was a superb meeting, probably one of the best I’ve attended since the PI3K meeting that AACR hosted in February last year. I wrote nearly half a Moleskine of notes that vaguely resemble chicken scratch – there were so many good talks that stimulated new ideas and explained a few scientific things I also didn’t know too well. Learning is a continuous lifetime experience, after all.

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ASH 2011 Update #3 – Multiple Myeloma

By MaverickNY on January 4, 2012

Most new developments in cancer research tend to occur in increments, thus we see a fair number of improvements in survival (whether PFS or OS) in the 1-4 month range over the existing standard of care. However, as we saw recently at European Conference for Clinical Oncology (ECCO) in September and the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) last month with the BOLERO-2 nad CLEOPATRA trials, every once in a while something comes along that shifts the efficacy curve by six or seven months and people rightly get very excited about this.

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