Dec 14, 2023
Celebrating 20 Years of Evolution in GU Oncology
Drs. Eric Small, Anthony Zietman, and Eric Klein share their reflections as founders of the ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium and discuss key moments in the Meeting’s development, its role in advancing GU cancer research, and major challenges ahead for the field as the Symposium celebrates its 20-year anniversary.
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Eric Small: Hello, and welcome to the ASCO Daily News Podcast. I'm Dr. Eric Small, your guest host of this ASCO Daily News Podcast today. I'm the co-leader of the UCSF Prostate Cancer Program and deputy director and chief scientific officer at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.
This year, quite amazingly, we're celebrating the 20th anniversary of the ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium, which is hosted annually in San Francisco. The Symposium has heralded some of the biggest strides in GU oncology and has the largest multidisciplinary, global audience for GU cancer research.
I was honored to have a role in the development of ASCO GU two decades ago, along with my friends and colleagues, Dr. Eric Klein, emeritus professor and chair of the Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. And Dr. Anthony Zietman, a professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital.
On today's episode, we'll be reflecting on key moments in the meeting's development, its role in advancing GU cancers and GU cancer research, and major challenges that lay ahead for the field. You'll find our full disclosures in the transcript of this episode, and disclosures of all guests on the podcast are available at asco.org/DNpod.
Eric and Anthony, I'm delighted to have this opportunity to catch up with you both to discuss ASCO GU, thank you for coming on the podcast today.
Dr. Eric Klein: Thanks for having us.
Dr. Anthony Zietman: Thanks for the invitation.
Dr. Eric Small: Well, it's really exciting and it's wonderful to see the two of you. So, the ASCO GU Symposium has been a key annual event for all of us in the GU field. But to give our listeners some background, when the Symposium was first created, when we first met in San Francisco, starting on Thursday, February 17, 2005, it brought together 1,035 individuals interested in the prevention and treatment at that point of prostate cancer alone.
At that time, the meeting was co-sponsored by ASCO, the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology or ASTRO, the Society of Urologic Oncology (SUO), and the Prostate Cancer Foundation. It was actually the culmination of several years of planning. Clearly, it represented the first truly multidisciplinary scientific and educational meeting dedicated solely to prostate cancer, and we'll come back to talk about that.
The meeting went back and forth between San Francisco and Florida for a few years before finally, settling permanently in San Francisco. In the last 20 years, ASCO and the Symposium's co-sponsors expanded the meeting to include all genitourinary specialties. This year, ASCO received more than 875 abstract submissions and anticipates that there will be even more attendees than last year.
On a personal note, it's truly amazing to me that here we are, 20 years later, and the meeting is going stronger than we could ever have imagined. I must say that my motivation to help organize this meeting stem from two issues that were somewhat in tension with each other.
First, the field of prostate cancer and prostate cancer research was just starting to take off at the time, and we really needed, as a community, a venue where across disciplines, we could talk and meet with each other. But that was in real tension, at least at ASCO, where we were relegated at the Annual Meeting to a tiny room at the far end of the convention center on the last day of ASCO, because really, that's all we could muster.
And I do remember making a pitch, assuring folks that there was an unmet need, and that the field was going to take off, who knew? So, I'm wondering, and either of you can jump in (Dr. Klein, Dr. Zietman), tell us how you got involved in the first GU meeting, and what's the most salient feature of your involvement? Anthony, do you want to start?
Dr. Anthony Zietman: I think it's really important to discuss the historical context at which this meeting was born. Back in the 1990s, we were incredibly polarized as specialties in GU oncology. PSA had been introduced in the late '80s, early '90s, screening was everywhere. There was a tidal wave of patients and an almost reckless race to treatment.
All surgeons believed that all patients with localized early prostate cancer needed surgery and that they could do individually, a beautiful job. And all radiation oncologists believed that they could deliver morbidity-free treatment and could do it to everyone regardless of your age or stage.
And there were a few, there were a few who thought maybe we didn't need to screen everyone, and maybe there was a little bit of overtreatment, maybe we've gone a little bit too far, but those voices were really suppressed in the '90s. Those voices didn't have a voice.
Many of us also believed there was more morbidity to our treatment than we'd appreciated. And that was the media in which, us three, all young research physicians, probably all in our low forties were given the charge of this meeting. And the thing I most remember about it in the planning, is that we actually decided collectively to give voice to everyone, including maverick voices.
It wasn't just about the party line, and it wasn't just about the North American line, there were Britts and there were Swedes, and there were Dutchmen who had very important things to say as well, and very, very different perspectives. And we also chose to give voice to young people as well as just our party elders, so to speak.
I don't know which of us, if any of us, or maybe it was our society suggested but we do it all in a single room such that rad oncs and surgeons were all together, and it led to a kind of forced truthfulness, which started to break down this groupthink that we developed in our own silo.
So, when I look back, I think that that context was very important and that what we sought as young program chairs was we sort of tapped in something that was latent in our field. Eric KIein, I don't know if you remember things as I did.
Dr. Eric Klein: I do. And things were very siloed then. We had hired early in the mid-90s, I think, a young radiation oncologist named Pat Kupelian, who became a close collaborator and a good friend, and who really changed the narrative around treating prostate cancer at the Cleveland Clinic, which was all surgical prior to that time. And he did such high-quality work, it was hard not to pay attention. And he actually took it on himself in his early years when he wasn't very busy to sit down and go through all the patients that we had treated with prostate cancer at the Cleveland Clinic, radiation versus surgery, and had the temerity to write a manuscript that showed that there was no difference in survival, based on PSA biochemical recurrence and metastasis and that sort of thing.
And that was sort of game changing. And it really clued me into the fact that for patient's sake, we needed to be talking to our colleagues. The second perspective was from the perspective of having attended a couple of Prostate Cancer Foundation meetings. And I think they really deserve credit for increasing the visibility of prostate cancer research, and funding it and recruiting really good scientists from other disciplines.
When young scientists were told, and we heard this repeatedly, "Don't spend your career researching prostate cancer, it's a dead end." And PCF did a great job of having a multidisciplinary meeting, which was smaller and not so clinically focused, but also got me excited.
Dr. Eric Small: I think you're right, Eric. And I think that the transdisciplinary nature, as Anthony pointed…