The 2012 Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology in Vienna, Austria from 28 September to 2 October is a meeting I am looking forward to attending.

Last year at the 2011 European Multidisciplinary Cancer Congress (ECCO/ESMO/ESTRO) in Stockholm we saw a lot of new data, including the phase III trial results for the ALSYMPCA trial with radium-223 (Alpharadin) in advanced prostate cancer and the Bolero-2 trial with everolimus (Afinitor) in ER/PR+ HER2- breast cancer.

What can we expect at ESMO 2012 this year? 

As we saw last year, the timing of the meeting provides the opportunity for presentation of data that matured after the early 2012 cut-off for submission to the ASCO annual meeting in June.

The titles of the late breaking abstracts have just been published in the ESMO 2012 searchable program. This offers some insight into what we can expect in the Presidential or Plenary Symposia at the meeting, where major trials and ground-breaking data are typically presented.

Presidential Symposia 1 – Sunday, September 30, 2012

  • LBA1_PR | Phase III study of crizotinib versus pemetrexed or docetaxel chemotherapy in patients with advanced ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) (PROFILE 1007)
  • LBA2 | SEARCH: A phase III, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of sorafenib plus erlotinib in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)
  • LBA3 | Cetuximab in combination with capecitabine and cisplatin as first-line treatment in advanced gastric cancer: Randomized controlled phase III EXPAND study
  • LBA4 | Adjuvant FOLFOX4 with or without cetuximab (CTX) in patients (pts) with resected stage III colon cancer (CC): DFS and OS results and subgroup analyses of the PETACC8 Intergroup Phase III Trial

Presidential Symposia II – Monday, October 1

  • LBA5 | PHARE Trial results comparing 6 to 12 months of trastuzumab in adjuvant early breast cancer
  • LBA6 | HERA TRIAL: 2 years versus 1 year of trastuzumab after adjuvant chemotherapy in women with HER2-positive early breast cancer at 8 years of median follow up
  • LBA7 | Results of a randomised phase III trial (EORTC 62012) of single agent doxorubicin versus doxorubicin plus ifosfamide as first line chemotherapy for patients with advanced or metastatic soft tissue sarcoma: a survival study by the EORTC Soft Tissue and Bone Sarcoma Group.
  • LBA8_PR | Randomized, open label, phase III trial of pazopanib versus sunitinib in first-line treatment of patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC); Results of the COMPARZ trial

ESMO 2012 also has a full program of keynote presentations, educational sessions and scientific symposia, so I expect it to be an interesting meeting. I am particularly looking forward to the poster presentations as, often at oncology/hematology scientific meetings, this is where you find useful insights into future new product development.

The twitter hashtag for the Congress is #ESMO12, so do follow this for conversation about the meeting over the next few weeks as the abstracts become available on Monday, September 17 and companies announce the data they expect to present.

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