|
 The
schedule for the meeting is included in your program package. This
morning we will have two plenary sessions. We have asked the speakers
to give brief and very conceptual overviews in a number of areas
that we believe are the most exciting currently, and we have asked
them to focus on the key research questions within those areas.
After lunch,
we will begin our simultaneous breakout sessions. During the first
half of the afternoon, we will have two working groups: the first
on therapeutic resistance in AML, and the second working group on
antibody-delivered therapy. At three o'clock, we will break and
have two more simultaneous breakout sessions: the first on new agents
and strategies for clinical trial design and monitoring, and the
second on immunotherapy.
We have not
assigned individuals to the breakout sessions. We think that within
this population, people should follow their interests into the discussion
areas that they find most interesting. Initially, however, we would
like you to attend the breakout sessions that most clearly represent
the area in which you do your primary research, in part so that
we can have a critical mass right from the beginning to initiate
the discussions.
Within the breakout
sessions, the discussion leaders have invited several participants
to give short presentations, not so much background information
but rather to present most recent data, some of which will be unpublished,
and we hope this will initiate the discussion process.
In the interests
of cross-pollination, however, we do encourage you to attend the
other working groups and to come forward and speak up. We have kept
the number of participants for this meeting relatively small so
that everyone will have an opportunity to speak and participate.
We plan to have
dinner together this evening in order to keep our discussions flowing.
We are very pleased that David Parkinson will be giving a keynote
address with his thoughts on improving the cancer clinical trials
process and his perspective both from the NCI and his current position
in industry.
This, also,
gives me an opportunity to thank two pharmaceutical companies who
have active drug development programs in leukemia, Novartis and
Wyeth-Ayerst, who are sponsoring the dinner this evening.
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8:08
AM
The
clinical trials cooperative groups have been given the responsibility
by the NCI to organize the State of the Science meetings in leukemia.
The Planning Committee for this meeting is shown on this slide and
includes investigators from the cooperative groups as well as from
the National Cancer Institute and the cancer centers.
I
have listed on this slide our goals for this particular meeting.
Broadly stated we want to identify the most promising targets for
therapeutic advances in acute myeloid leukemia in order to accelerate
major new clinical interventions.
Tomorrow
morning, starting again at eight o'clock, we will reconvene the
breakout sessions. Each group will meet to summarize their deliberations.
There will be a final plenary session at ten where we will meet
again together in this room to begin to answer the following questions:
What are the most promising therapeutic opportunities; and how do
we facilitate the evaluation of new ideas through clinical trials?
Finally,
these discussions are being videotaped and will appear verbatim
at this website (www.webtie.org)in order to disseminate our deliberations
most widely among the research community and our colleagues who
aren't here today. Verbatim transcripts will be made of the plenary
session. The speakers have been asked to allow us to copy their
slides. These will also appear at this website, and you will be
able to refer back to exactly what was said here.