The Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) annual meeting promises to be a most interesting one, if the first day is anything to go by. It’s being held this week at National Harbor, Maryland on the banks of the Potomac River just south of Washington DC.

As the meeting started with some intensive workshops yesterday, the American Society for Hematology (ASH) annual meeting abstracts were released at 9am, giving up a choice between writing up SITC in situ or switching gears and analysing the initial hematology abstracts. In the interests of sanity, we have decided to focus on SITC for the next week, then move onto the AACR-NCI-EORTC conference, before reviewing the ASH data in detailed previews.

SITC is mostly a translational science meeting with a little bit of relevant clinical data through in here and there. It’s also not for the faint hearted, especially given the sheer intensity and pace of some of the talks – keeping up with pen and paper to hastily scribble notes is surprisingly quite hard!

It was an honour to attend as one of the few members of the media here. The excitement is palpable, with speakers reminding us of how only a few years ago, few people attended immunotherapy sessions at ASCO. SITC is rapidly becoming a major meeting with a record-breaking 1500 expected for the first time! It is the immuno-oncology meeting to attend for those interested in understanding the emerging trends, landscape and direction that research is taking us.

Yesterday SITC fielded two workshops with impressive line-ups from the immuno-oncology space that included Drs Carl June, James Allison, Tom Gajewski, Susan Topalian, Stephen Hodi and Mario Sznol, to name a few. The workshops focused on different topics:

  • A basic one on understanding the immune system
  • A more advanced one on combination strategies in immunotherapy

Rather than summarise all the talks from both sessions that ran a full day each, we’ve decided to focus on some themes, ideas and concepts that catch our attention each day. Here’s the first of our daily reviews from the SITC 2014 annual meeting. Thanks to all our subscribers whose support enabled us to attend this meeting for the first time.

To learn more about our impressions from the SITC immunotherapy workshops yesterday, you can log-in.

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