ESMO Congress Marks 50 Years by Showcasing the Future of Cancer Care: Vivek Subbiah, MD

Later this week, from October 17 to 21, oncologists from around the world will gather in Berlin, Germany, for the 50th European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress.

Ahead of the meeting, The American Journal of Managed Care^® spoke with Vivek Subbiah, MD, chief of early-phase drug development at Sarah Cannon Research Institute, about what he is most looking forward to experiencing in Berlin. Reflecting on the milestone 50th meeting, he also shares his perspective on how oncology has evolved over the past 5 decades.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What are you looking forward to most at this year's ESMO Congress?

ESMO Berlin is going to be fantastic because, for the first time ever in the history of any major meeting, there are 2 special tracks. One is the AI track, and the second track is close to my heart; it's the tumor-agnostic track. What is a tumor-agnostic track? It focuses on the biomarker, not on the tissue of origin.

Tumor-agnostic therapy, or tumor-agnostic drug development, is a different way to think about cancers. We are used to thinking about breast cancer, kidney cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, and brain cancer. A tumor-agnostic drug is a drug that focuses on the biomarker.

In the last decade, we have had almost 10 drugs approved in a histology-agnostic, tumor-agnostic fashion. ESMO is going to be featuring a separate tumor-agnostic track, and I have the pleasure and honor of chairing that track this year. It's going to be an exciting time in Berlin.

As the ESMO Congress marks its 50th year, what stands out to you most about how oncology has evolved over this time?

I think the last 50 years have been unprecedented in oncology. We started with just diagnosing, to no treatment, to a lot of treatments. We went through the chemotherapy era, the surgery era, and the radiotherapy era. Now, we are moving on to the precision oncology, or personalized medicine, era.

We have genomically targeted therapies, agents that arm the immune system, the so-called immunotherapies, antibody-drug conjugates, PROTACs [proteolysis-targeting chimeras], molecular glues, degraders, radioligands, CAR [chimeric antigen receptor] T cells, bispecifics, and much, much more. We have amazing advances, not just in genomics, but in all the multi-omics: the transcriptomics, proteomics, microbiomics, and beyond.

What is interesting is that AI, artificial intelligence, is helping us. Hopefully, in the future, it can help us put all these pieces of information together. Ultimately, we are all here because we want to help the patient sitting in front of us, so we can think about realizing the central mantra of precision medicine, or precision oncology, which is delivering the right drug to the right patient at the right time.