By the time you read this, Harriet and I will have wrapped up a wonderful weekend in Cape May, NJ, where we celebrated the wedding of our son, Ken.
I’ll share more on that later, but for now I’d like to share a few impressions from the recent ASCO meeting in Chicago. This year’s ASCO was an interesting experience for me, primarily for what I did not see – namely, transformative breakthroughs. It appears that many of our efforts on targeted therapies have yielded more heat than light. We still practice creeping incrementalism, hoping to build an edifice of effective therapy one brick at a time. Perhaps we need a new type of building, and this is where research comes into play.
We all need to ask ourselves if our work is truly designed to lay the groundwork for transformative approaches to understanding, preventing and treating cancer. Do it for all the people who depend upon our success for their lives.
Kudos to Mike Pishvaian for his excellent oral presentation on the therapy of colorectal cancer patients with an alkylating agent and a PARP inhibitor. This study truly was a tour de force, and Mike represented the work, which he conceived of and led, elegantly and in a manner that brought distinction to him and to Georgetown Lombardi. Congratulations, Mike!