Virtual Plenary Debate, a new session not-to-be missed

New this year, the Virtual Plenary Debate session taking place on Friday 17 September at the ESMO Congress 2021 will be the ideal debating time for the oncology community to think around the latest key studies presented at the ESMO Virtual Plenaries.

“Science is moving faster than ever”, explained ESMO President Prof. Solange Peters commenting on the launch of the new ESMO virtual platform in 2020. “It looked and sounded more and more artificial to imagine that we have to wait until the annual important meetings, two or three time points in the year, until we can get the latest data and, more importantly, bring this data to the patients.” In fact, the ESMO Virtual Plenaries taking place each month, except in September, offer the opportunity to researchers to present the latest, original scientific data from randomised phase III trials or from phase II trials which demonstrate remarkable therapeutic benefit, scientific insight or progress in an area of unmet need.

At the Virtual Plenary Debate, recently presented key studies will be rediscussed against the current clinical practice setting, engaging congress delegates into a live Q&A with discussants at the end of the presentation. The Session will be co-chaired by Dr Pasi Jänne, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, U.S., and Prof. Tony Mok, Prince of Wales Hospital, Hong Kong, Congress co-chairs. “The selected abstracts represent important scientific advances for which there is still need for in-depth review and discussion in the Congress. In the Virtual Plenary Debate session we reversed the usual sequence of speakers: a discussant will start by summarizing the abstract and critically querying its data for the investigator to follow with answers and comments”, explained ESMO Chief Medical Officer, Prof. George Pentheroudakis.

The following studies will be discussed:

- Presented in July, results from KEYNOTE-522 trial, supporting pembrolizumab plus platinum-containing neoadjuvant chemotherapy, followed by adjuvant pembrolizumab after surgery as a new standard-of-care treatment regimen for patients with high-risk, early-stage TNBC (VP3_2021)

- Presented in April, a retrospective cohort study comparing clinical outcomes with anti−PD-(L)1 therapy alone or combined with platinum-based chemotherapy in PD-L1 high non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) reported that sparing the chemotherapy in 1L CIT treatment does not appear to impact survival outcomes in most patients (VP7_2021)

- Presented in May, results from the BOOSTER trial aiming to determine the efficacy and safety of bevacizumab and osimertinib versus osimertinib alone in patients with NSCLC with EGFR mutation (exon 19 del or L858R) and T790M-mutation at progression on a prior EGFR TKI, showed no superiority of osimertinib plus bevacizumab over osimertinib alone with respect to PFS (VP2_2021)

- Presented in May, the EMPOWER-Cervical 1/GOG-3016/ENGOT-cx9 trial showed that cemiplimab significantly improves overall survival over single agent chemotherapy for patients with R/M cervical cancer after 1L platinum-based treatment regardless of PD-L1 status or histology (VP4_2021)