Avoiding chemotherapy for certain patients was not all we learned at this year’s meeting.

• The addition of 6 months of low-dose maintenance chemotherapy after initial treatment for rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare muscle cancer, increased the 5-year OS rate from 73.7% to 86.5%! This marked the first treatment advance for this cancer in 30 years.
• In the phase III PREOPANC-1 trial, 10 weeks of neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy improved DFS and OS for patients with pancreatic cancer compared with immediate surgery. Median OS was 17.1 months compared to 13.7 for the neoadjuvant and surgical arms, respectively.
• Also in pancreatic cancer, the PRODIGE 24 trial showed patients with nonmetastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma had increased OS benefit from a modified FOLFIRNOX regimen as compared with gemcitabine, 54.4 months versus 35.0 months.

Finally, results from the phase III Carmena trial showed patients with advanced kidney cancer can avoid nephrectomy all together. Researchers demonstrated the median OS for patients who underwent therapy and then adjuvant treatment with sunitinib had a median OS of 13.9 months, compared with 18.4 months for patients who underwent treatment with sunitinib at time of diagnosis.

Whether its incorporating genetic testing, avoiding overtreatment with chemotherapy, offering immunotherapy in the first line, or changing standards of practice to include neoadjuvant or maintenance chemotherapy, much is changing all at once. ASCO has come and gone, and it was easy to miss all the new findings. The Chemotherapy Foundation Symposium ®: Innovative Cancer Therapy for Tomorrow® exists to fill in the gap. Come learn what you may have missed from the researchers and clinical trial leaders themselves!