January 22 2020
NRG Oncology Plenary Session
NRG Oncology held a new, reformatted Plenary Session at the January 2020 Semiannual Meeting in Houston, Texas, which replaced the previously separate General and Scientific Sessions.
The first half of the session focused on a review of NRG Oncology’s activities in 2019 and the goals the organization is focusing on in 2020.
Dr. Walter Curran, NRG Oncology Group Chair, provided the 2019 summary of NRG Oncology which included some major highlights such as the award of a 6-year Competitive Renewal Grant (NRG scored a 16) and the NRG NCORP grant, the submission of the NRG Biospecimen Bank grant, the highest number of NRG trials activated in a year, a strong level of enrollment across all committees and institutions with 2254 patients accrued to NRG-led trials, a large volume of high-level publications, and NRG’s success with the NCTN Navigator System. Dr. Curran also presented the top accruing NRG Member Sites list, of which Boston Medical Center led the efforts with 425 patients accrued to NRG trials. NRG committee leadership transitions were also announced, including:
- Dr. Theodore S. Hong of Massachusetts General Hospital will become a Co-Chair for the NRG Gastrointestinal Cancer Committee and Chair of the Non-Colorectal GI Cancer Subcommitee. Dr. Christopher Crane from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center was thanked for his dedication and hard work in leading this committee.
- Dr. Steven Lin of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Dr. Sandip Patel of University of California, San Diego will become a Chair and Co-Chair, respectively, for the NRG Oncology Developmental Therapeutics Radiation Therapy Subcommittee. NRG thanked Dr. David Raben of the University of Colorado for his dedicated leadership of this subcommittee.
- The NRG Protocol Support Committee (PSC) welcomes Terry Thomas as Chair and Nancy Fusco and Cynthia Licavoli as Vice Chairs to lead the committee. Susan Nolte (former Chair) and Nancy Knudsen (former Co-Chair) were thanked for their efforts in PSC. NRG is grateful of their hard work.
Dr. Norman Wolmark, NRG Oncology Group Chair, provided a powerful special tribute to the late Dr. Bernard (Bernie) Fisher who passed away in October 2019. Dr. Fisher was a founding member (1958) and eventual chairman (1967-1994) of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP) and was a Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. As a pioneer in the field of breast cancer research, he advanced the understanding of the clinical biology of breast cancer as well as establishing the design and implementation of multi-institutional randomized trials.
The second portion of the Plenary Session focused on cancer immunology in the group and was moderated by Dr Robert Mannel, NRG Oncology Group Chair. Dr. Samir Khleif of Georgetown University discussed the general and treatment-specific mechanisms, immune-combination incompatibility, immunotherapy biologic incompatibility, and adaptive resistance factors of immunotherapy resistance and efforts to tackle these barriers in his presentation “Overcoming Immune Resistance, the Next Frontier”. Dr. Kristin Higgins of Emory University provided an overview of the NRG-LU005 phase II/III study comparing chemoradiotherapy to a combination of chemoradiotherapy and atezolizumab in patients with limited stage small cell lung cancer (SCLC). Dr. Ramez Eskander of the University of California, San Diego provided lessons learned from his experiences as Principal Investigator on the NRG-GY018 phase III, placebo-controlled, randomized trial evaluating pembrolizumab with paclitaxel and carboplatin for women with measurable stage III or IVA, stage IVB or recurrent endometrial cancer. Lastly, Dr. Jarushka Naidoo of Johns Hopkins University reviewed immune-related toxicity and innovations for future directions to address these adverse events.