Key Trends from the 2023 ASCO Annual Meeting

The always eagerly anticipated ASCO Annual Meeting concluded on Tuesday, June 6, and left the oncology community with much to think about and discuss. We noted some interesting trends that will continue to shape those thoughts and discussions.

1. Health care equity and access

Starting several years ago, the ASCO leadership team made it a crucial goal to improve access both to clinical trials and to approved agents, particularly in underserved communities. This continues to be a focus of oral presentations and abstracts, and this year included not only discussion around ways to ensure clinical trial enrollment is reflective of the patient population for the respective therapeutic areas, but also encompassed improving access to agents that can be prohibitively expensive or not accessible to those in some geographic regions, eg, CAR T-cell therapies. In addition, much discussion focused on risk assessment and proactive screening for cancers such as colorectal cancer and lung cancer, and, maybe equally importantly, raised the issue of addressing those factors that may impact the risk of multiple types of cancer and may be correlated with socioeconomic status, such as air pollution.?

2. The continuing evolution of immunotherapy in oncology

The first approval of a PD-1 targeted therapy occurred in 2014. It’s hard to believe how far the field has come in less than 10 years, and there are now multiple PD-1 and PD-L1 agents approved for multiple indications. The ASCO Annual Meeting highlighted how the role of these antibodies continues to evolve, with many studies assessing their utility throughout the treatment journey, including in the neoadjuvant and adjuvant settings, and other studies investigating the efficacy of multiple new PD-1 targeted agents in the clinical pipeline. It’s no longer the revolution it was, but an evolution.?

Antibody technology in general is rapidly evolving, and there were a number of presentations that highlighted the progress being made with antibody drug conjugates and with bispecific antibodies that target both tumor-specific antigens and specific immune cells, enabling a finely tuned immune response to biomarker-expressing cancer cells. Finally, the development of cancer vaccines in therapeutic areas such as melanoma and glioblastoma has begun to show promise.

3. Putting the patient first

The presidential theme for this year’s meeting was “Partnering with Patients,” and that theme was manifested in multiple ways throughout the meeting. In many presentations, the quality-of-life outcomes for patients in clinical studies or in real-world analysis were discussed. Other presentations highlighted trials that were designed to assess the value of specific agents in each line of therapy, with a goal to avoid overtreatment of patients, thus saving patients from additional toxicities with no added benefits. Lastly, appropriate patient selection was a recurrent theme throughout the meeting. Technologies and approaches optimizing patient selection, such as more refined biomarker assessment, were emphasized as a way to put the patient’s needs first and save each patient from a therapy that is not likely to be effective for them.

4. “Big data,” AI, and negative trials

As is every other aspect of life in 2023, “big data” and AI will play a role in oncology. Several sessions at the ASCO Annual Meeting involved discussions around what impact they may have in the therapeutic landscape and in patient care. This will certainly be an ongoing discussion in future annual meetings.?

Also noteworthy was the number of negative trials presented. It was mentioned that even these negative data can impact future study design, patient selection, or other aspects of clinical development. And all knowledge is useful, as annual meeting attendees know from experience.

If you're interested in connecting with GENICOS' oncology experts, contact Melissa Bojorquez at [email protected]