Saturday
Oral abstracts: Leukemia, MDS, allo transplant E451, 3-6pm
Dai Chihara, a former MD Anderson lymphoma fellow and now a first-year fellow at NCI, is presenting abstract 7003: Randomized phase II study of cladribine with simultaneous or delayed rituximab in patients with hairy cell leukemia. The title is self-explanatory so I won’t dwell on the topic, but Dai has won the endowed ASCO Merritt Award for the highest-scoring abstract among the Merritt Award applicants. Congratulations, Dai.
Hind Rafei, a former GWU internal medicine resident and NCI/NHLBI rotator, and now a first-year fellow at MD Anderson will present abstract 7008: Off-the-shelf virus specific T-cells for therapy of adenovirus disease in immunosuppressive patients. She is also an ASCO Merritt Award winner. What is it with these first-year fellows and their ASCO orals. Must be something in the water in Houston.
The most investing abstract in the session is 7002: Association of smoking with poor risk ELN 2017, cytogenetic, molecular profile, and survival outcomes in acute myeloid leukemia. Smoking doesn’t only make you older, it makes your bone marrow older too, and makes you have bad AML independently of other bad things it does to your health. I hope we won’t have to go through the same rigamarole for vaping now too. New FDA boss Ned Sharpless is a leukemia doc, so this should encourage him to follow his predecessor’s lead on the issue.
Sunday
Frontline therapy in mantle cell lymphoma: to transplant or not to transplant? E451, 4:45-5:45pm
No. Unless it’s part of a randomized trial that includes a no-transplant arm. But mostly no.
Monday
Posters: Leukemia, MDS, allo transplant, lymphoma, CLL… all of it Hall A, 8-11am
Abstracts 7009 to 7072: these are the leukemia, MDS, allo-SCT abstracts that didn’t make it to orals. A few will be covered in the poster discussion session (see below). Note abstracts 7028, 7058, and 7059, which are almost word-for-word identical to what’s in the ASH 2018 Annual Meeting abstract book. What is ASCO to do with submissions like this?
Abstract 7543 (board 297): Response to brentuximab vedotin by CD30 expression: Results from five trials in PTCL, CTCL, and B-cell lymphomas. If you want to see a pathologist squirm ask them whether this particular lymphoma is CD30-positive. What’s positive? And does BV play any role in lymphomas other than Hodgkin, ALCL, and CTCL with large cell transformation? I don’t think this poster will answer the question but I want to see the data.
Abstract 7565 (board 319): Effect of epigenetic modifier-based combinations on efficacy in patients with peripheral T-cell lymphoma (PTCL): Deciphering impact of mutations in epigenetic operations in response. The combination of 5-azacitidine and romidepsin for PTCL studied at Columbia was a big hit at ASH 2018. This is the correlative data from Owen O’Connor’s group that I’m very interested in seeing.
Acute myeloid leukemia in older adults: more versus less therapy S404, 8-9:15am
I’ve seen more treatment-related AML than I’d like this past year, and Elihu Estey is always fun to listen.
Posters: cancer prevention and epidemiology Hall A, 1:15-4:15pm
Abstract 1551 (board 45): Association of geographic clustering of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma in the state of Georgia with environmental exposure to benzene and trichloroethylene. Plausible.
Abstract 1565 (board 59): risk of breast implant-associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma in a cohort of 3,546 women prospectively followed after receiving textured breast implants. So many questions about this one coming from MSKCC: did they collect plasma? PBMCs? Did they look at the HLA type? Have any of the women developed “breast implant disease”? I hope prospective collection didn’t mean just monitoring for ALCL…
Poster discussion: leukemia, MDS, allo transplants E450, 4:30-6pm
Kind of have to come to this one, seeing as I’m chairing it, and also discussing three interesting posters (abstracts 7018, 7019, and 7020, all on histiocytes gone bad).
Yes, ASCO Annual Meetings are light on hematologic malignancies, but it is a nice change of pace not to have to run from session to session and actually have time to connect with colleagues from around the country as we all wait together in the bus line.