Dr. Alan Sandler is an international leader in the lung cancer world, also identified as among the most down to earth and funniest people in the field (and though that might not sound like much, he travels with an audio clip of a rim shot to play after his jokes). His talks are light-hearted, but he's so highly regarded because he has also been deeply involved in several of the pivotal research activities that have helped shape our current treatments. He led the original study that led to the approval of gemcitabine in lung cancer, and more recently he led the ECOG 4599 trial that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and established the benefit of Avastin with carbo/taxol for advanced lung cancer.

Dr. Sandler recently moved from Vanderbilt to my corner of the world (more or less), where he leads the Division of Hematology and Oncology at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. He was kind enough to participate in our NSCLC Patient Education Forum, where he provided a general introduction to the biggest questions of managing advanced NSCLC: does treatment really help, and how much? He also provided an overall review of the landscape in how we approach first line therapy for metastatic NSCLC, from someone who has been a big part of developing those standards.

Here is the audio and video versions of his presentation, along with the accompanying figures and transcript.

[powerpress]

sandler intro to first line treatment of advanced nsclc audio podcast

sandler-intro-to-first-line-treatment-of-advanced-nsclc-figures

sandler-first-line-treatment-of-advanced-nsclc-transcript

I'm trying to leverage my proximity to Dr. Sandler, as well as my longtime friendship with him, to get him to involved with more of our GRACE activities. Fortunately, he's been very gracious and generous with his time, so get more of his perspective , and maybe even some good jokes, from him in the future as well.