ASCO 2025 Plenary Sessions Poised to Shift Clinical Practice: Sanjay Goel, MD, MS

Ahead of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2025 annual meeting, Sanjay Goel, MD, MS, professor of medicine at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and medical oncologist at Rutgers Cancer Institute, shared his excitement for the many sessions that will be presented at this year's conference.

He also previewed key results of a study on the clinical characteristics and outcomes of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC)—across diverse racial and ethnic groups—enrolled in phase 1 trials.

This transcript was lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What are you looking forward to the most at this year's ASCO meeting?

In general, what I found is that every year there are some wonderful plenary sessions. The top 4 or 5 abstracts picked for plenary [are] where almost the entire meeting attendees participate; several of them end up being practice-changing. That is clearly one session I never miss. The other thing is even [in] the smaller session[s], there's always so many things happening. I definitely walk away from ASCO with a lot of encouragement, hope, and, of course, ideas for future research endeavors.

The study you are presenting at ASCO found no significant differences in outcomes across racial and ethnic groups with mCRC. What does this suggest about potential impacts on overall survival in this patient population?

I think what we try to do here is essentially trying to demonstrate 2 facts. One is that, because patients are kind of at a crossroad when they undergo a certain number of lines of therapy, the treating physicians and the patients are at a crossroad whether they should continue on to what is considered a standard of care or to seek newer treatment options with novel agents, which is essentially what phase 1 trials represent.

Two is, given that even though the US population is undergoing a demographic change with the increasing minority population, our enrollment to clinical trials still remains predominantly non-Hispanic White. We were trying to essentially demonstrate the second thing, [which] was whether the race and ethnicity of the patients matter when they enrolled onto the trials. The most important takeaway points are that for a patient who [is] at a crossroad, I think with these data, they can be confident that enrolling onto such a trial is definitely not compromising their long-term outlook. In fact, [it] is giving them the opportunity to enroll onto a clinical trial with the novel agent. It was heartening to note that the overall outcomes of patients are similar, regardless of their race and ethnic background.

I think what is unique about the population we present is because this is drawn from 2 very ethnically diverse cancer centers, more than 50% of our patients belong to ethnic minorities, and so given the results that we see that overall outcomes are quite similar between all the races, I think it goes to show that as long as patients have good access to care, everyone is going to enjoy similar benefits from interventions that we're able to provide.