ASCO Abstracts Now Publicly Available

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May 15, 2008 - 8:27 pm Dr. West

  In past years, a huge book of abstracts, the approximately 250 word summaries for each study, were mailed out to members of ASCO (the American Society of Clinical Oncology) in mid-May, but they weren’t publicly available to anyone else until the time of the huge annual conference about 2-3 weeks later (where most of the biggest breakthroughs from around the world are presented each year).  In that interval, there was invariably some leaking of key information that led to “insiders” running the stock prices of particular companies up or down depending on how favorable the abstracts looked as bellwethers for the future of one cancer drug or another.  That wasn’t a great system, obviously.

   ASCO changed its policy this year to give everyone equal access to these abstracts online.  They were just released and are available here.   The only ones that aren’t available yet are the highest stakes ones that are in the plenary session, including the “FLEX” trial of chemo with or without the EGFR monoclonal antibody Erbitux (cetuximab), which is reportedly positive for a signficant survival benefit according to a September, 2007 press release (with the 8 months since then a ridiculously long time to have no further information offered). 

   There are hundreds of abstracts just on lung cancer, and they are broken down into early stage/adjuvant, locally advanced (including LD-SCLC), and metastatic lung cancer.   We’re going to have LOTS to cover over the next few months.  So look around, and I’ll try to provide background and commentary on as much as possible over time.

Posted in: General, Lung Cancer