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A program cochair said the agenda was designed to get attendees "out of their comfort zone." The Amercian Association for Cancer Research annual meeting runs April 25-30, with the key presentations coming Sunday through Tuesday.
Can we target HER2 in lung cancer without the adverse effects of today’s drugs?
Can an immune checkpoint inhibitor spare more patients with cancer from invasive surgery?
Is an off-the-shelf chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy ready for prime time?
Image: AACR
These are a few of the questions that will be explored over the next week as the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) hosts its 2025 annual meeting in Chicago. After education sessions on Friday and Saturday, the meeting picks up steam Sunday through Tuesday with plenary sessions and late-breaking trials, which focus on basic research and early stage findings.
The meeting theme, “Unifying Cancer Science and Medicine: A Continuum of Innovation for Impact,” highlights the need to close the gap between breakthrough research and what patients encounter day to day. Thus, many of the featured studies seek to overcome today’s barriers, from the manufacturing delays of CAR T-cell therapy to the adverse events some patients with lung cancer experience when taking the antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) trastuzumab deruxtecan (Enhertu).
Matthew Vander Heiden, MD, PhD | Image: MIT
One of the program chairs, Matthew G. Vander Heiden, MD, PhD, director of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told The American Journal of Managed Care® in an interview, “We tried to create a program for the 2025 AACR Annual Meeting that really covers the entire continuum from basic cancer discovery all the way through to translational research and clinical trials.”
Lillian Siu, MD | Image: Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Fellow program chair Lillian L. Siu, MD, FAACR, of Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, said the breadth of topics was designed to get attendees “out of their comfort zone.”
Thorny issues, such as finding cancer at earlier stages, rates of depression among patients, and the rising cancer rates among young adults, will also be tackled in education sessions and some trials. Following are meeting highlights by day.
Friday and Saturday. Education sessions include Friday’s session on cell and gene therapy and Saturday’s session, “Rising Rates of Early-Onset Cancers: Understanding the Shift and Exploring Policy Solutions.“ A late plenary session Saturday explores links between metabolism and liver cancer and the human microbiome “as a diagnostic and treatment target in oncology.”
Sunday. Kevan Shokat, PhD, professor and chair, Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology University of California San Francisco, credited with discovering the “pocket” in KRAS that allowed researchers to hit this “undruggable” target, will open the morning plenary session on the struggle to overcome that obstacle.
Clinical trial presentations will include the following:
Monday. The showstopper promises to be Beamion LUNG-1, evaluating zongertinib in patients with pretreated HER2-mutant advanced NSCLC. Boehringer Ingelheim previously announced that FDA had granted this oral HER2-specific tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) priority review, following a presentation in December that showed the therapy produced response in 71% of patients in the phase 1b study. So far, safety data for zongertinib have been highly favorable. John Heymach, MD, of MD Anderson, will present new data.
Other presentations include:
Tuesday. This day is wall-to-wall with late breakers, including studies involving health care disparities and quality of life. Highlights include: