SLIDES & TRANSCRIPTS
Monday, June 17

Welcome and introduction to the NCI State of the Science Meetings

Scott Saxman, MD

I would like to begin just by introducing this group to the CTEP State of the Science meetings.

The State of the Science meetings started out as one of the pilot projects that arose from the recommendations of the Armitage Committee. The State of the Science meetings are intended to assist in the idea generation process for specific diseases, to bring new ideas to the forefront, to give people an opportunity to interact with disciplines that they may not interact with on a regular basis, so that the best ideas could come forward and be tested.

These pilots also include disease-specific concept evaluation panels, which does not yet apply to sarcomas, the central IRB, the Cancer Trials Support Unit, which is an structure that allows cross-registration and cross-accrual to Group-wide phase III trials, both for Group members and, more recently, for people who are not members of the Cooperative Groups. Sarcoma studies will be taking advantage of this opportunity for not only larger phase III trials, but for histology-specific phase II studies. Again, that feeds into this network of investigators for clinical trials.

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The goals of the State of the Science conferences are listed here. First of all, to stimulate and accelerate the development of new clinical interventions for patients with cancer; to exploit what we know and what we are learning about the biology of cancer for clinical trial development and design, to identify the scientific and clinical issues that should be addressed, and the tools that will be necessary to fully explore novel and innovative approaches.

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We understood from the beginning that achieving these goals would require input from a broad group of investigators, and that is why you are here with diverse areas of interest and expertise.

If you look around the room, you will see that there are medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, surgeons, basic scientists, industry researchers, and individuals from the patient advocacy groups all represented here today.

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We have had several of State of the Science conferences that we have supported in what were originally considered the pilot diseases -- lung cancer, gastrointestinal cancer, genitourinary cancers, and leukemia.

We have the privilege here -- and I do think that it is a privilege -- of being the first group outside of the original pilot project to conduct one of these State of the Science conferences. So, sarcoma will be the first, not the last, but the first outside of the original set of diseases for which this pilot was designed.

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All of the previous State of the Science meetings are housed on a website after they are done. The goal here is to make the proceedings, the summary and the recommendations that will come out of your discussions this morning, this afternoon, and tomorrow morning available to investigators nationally and internationally.

This is the address for the website and this is what it looks like.

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The slides, the presentations, the manuscripts that you produce will be available to investigators here on the State of the Science website.

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So, this is the format for the meeting. I am just going to briefly go through this. I think Dr. Borden is going to go through some of these issues in a little more detail.
This morning and this afternoon will be a plenary session. The goal here is to have individuals, experts in the area, summarize recent progress and findings.

We have also asked them to go beyond the current data and to consider what they believe or they think are the most important questions that now need to be asked, and how those things might be addressed in a most expedient fashion. We have asked them to be provocative in that way, and I hope that they will do so, and I hope that that will spur discussion here among the larger group.

This will be interspersed with panel discussions that will include the speakers, giving you an opportunity to ask questions. We are actually going to have several speakers. We will hold questions until the panel discussion. The panel discussion will be an opportunity for then the entire group to interact, to raise other issues, to ask questions to the speakers, and get a preliminary opportunity to begin discussion.

The breakout sessions this afternoon provide an opportunity for smaller group discussion. We have broken you out into three groups. You may find that you are in a group that is not necessarily what you feel is your specific area of expertise, and that is what we tried to do in some circumstances. We want broad input into each of the topics that were chosen for the breakout sessions this afternoon, so that we get not just the pathologists talking to the pathologists, but the pathologists talking to people from other disciplines or experts from other disciplines, and that is what the breakout sessions are designed to do. The goal of the breakout sessions is to make recommendations for future biologic translations and clinical research directions and studies.

The breakout chairs have been prepped in advance. We have asked that they facilitate the discussion of ideas, to discuss opportunities from a scientific and clinical point of view, and then to make specific recommendations as to what each of the groups think are the most important issues and opportunities that need to be addressed.

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The final session tomorrow will be a summary of those major themes from the breakout sessions. The breakout group leaders will present the results of your discussions, a summary, a prioritization of what you all feel are the most important things that need to be investigated from each of the breakout groups, and then allow an opportunity for discussion and input from the entire group.

Here is where, if you feel that you would like to be in more than one of these breakout sessions, or you have ideas or suggestions for more than one of these topics, this would be an opportunity, again, to raise those in the context of the larger group, and hopefully to identify and discuss some cross cutting themes that go across these disciplines.

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So, the charge to you as participants is to participate openly in this dialogue, to feel free to express your ideas and views, intended to identify and discuss these promising opportunities for research in soft tissue sarcomas and, again, to develop recommendations regarding the most important problems or questions that need to be addressed, and the translational clinical research studies that should be developed and conducted to address them.

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I would like to give my warmest thanks to the people who have been involved in putting this together. This is a large meeting with a lot of diverse individuals. The chairs of this meeting, Dr. Ernie Borden and Murray Brennan, have put in a great deal of work here, and I am grateful to them.

The planning committee had multiple conference calls, a lot of emails back and forth identifying the scientific issues and who should address them and who should be present here, and that included Dr. Robert Bell, Chris Fletcher, Paul Meltzer, Murali Sundaram, and Jaap Verweij. I am very grateful to them as well. This would not have been possible without these individuals. I would also like to thank in advance the speakers for the plenary session and the breakout session chairs.

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I would like to end this introduction by paraphrasing a quote by Woody Allen. I think we all recognize and are very excited about some of the recent things that have happened in sarcoma, the GIST activities, some of the molecular biology that emerged. I think it is clear that there are great opportunities. I think it is also clear, coming into this field relatively late that, in the past, there have been pitfalls. Hopefully, we will be able to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities that now exist and, at least for this meeting, get you home by tomorrow night at 6 o'clock.
With that, I am going to turn it over to Dr. Borden

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