Summary




SLIDES & TRANSCRIPTS
Monday, June 17

Overview and Charge for the Sarcoma SOTS Meeting


Earnest C. Borden, MD
Slide 1:

DR. BORDEN: I would like to add my welcome to that of Scott and, on behalf of the organizing committee and my co-chair, Murray Brennan, we are appreciative of all of you to come on relatively short notice to this meeting.

The purpose of this meeting is to define the major opportunities that exist in sarcoma translational research.

Over the past two years, as a result of observations made just a little over two years ago, with Gleevec in gastrointestinal stromal tumors, there has been a wider realization of the understandings of cancer biology and targeted therapeutics, that could emerge from the studies of soft tissue sarcoma. This is a realization that has been long overdue.

Sarcoma research, over the last decade at least, particularly in the clinical arena, has languished. The chairs of the Cooperative Groups have struggled to keep sarcoma research alive.

Sarcoma is the only major tumor, I believe, which does not have a SPORE program, and this stifled interest, I think, is manifested today by the very good response that we have had to this meeting.

Of those individuals who were invited here, we have about 80 percent of people who were able to clear their schedules to attend.

It is difficult to get exact numbers as to the patients with sarcomas. This is some data that was provided to me by Barry Anderson from the SEER database, looking at various age groups and the number of annual cases of sarcomas of various types. This is only seven sarcoma types. It does not represent all of the major sarcoma types.

If you add up just these seven types, there are about 10,000 new diagnoses from the SEER database made on an annual basis with just these seven types.
My estimate would be that we are pushing approximately 15,000 new sarcoma cases, both bone and soft tissue, on an annual basis.

This puts sarcomas in the same order of magnitude, as far as number of new U.S. diagnoses, in the same order of magnitude as myeloma, cervical carcinomas, gliomas, carcinomas of the esophagus, and much more common than testicular carcinomas or Hodgkin's disease.

The pediatricians, of course, have led the way in providing a model, going back 20 years for Intergroup studies.

This is not quite appropriate because rhabdomyosarcoma diagnosis is not included in this SEER database number.

One can see that the major number of soft tissue sarcomas is in the adult population, not in the pediatric population.
We made a decision in the organization of this meeting early on that the focus should be soft tissue sarcomas and the focus should be soft tissue sarcomas of adults.

It is clear that the bone sarcomas and the pediatric sarcomas, that we have things to learn about that but, in the day-and-a-half time frame, we did not feel there was sufficient time to cover all of these topics.

TOP

Slide 2:

The three major areas that we will address in the conference, particularly with the breakout sessions, are the molecular and pathological redefinition of sarcomas.

Secondly, improving primary management, including new imaging modalities. Thirdly, the identification and the approaches to identify new systemic therapies.

TOP
Slide 3:

We have participants here from all of the major Cooperative Groups. There are participants from industry. We hope that we can stimulate more involvement and more realization of what can be learned and strategic approaches for industry-based research.

There are representatives of the major sarcoma or major cancer centers that, over the years, have had major programs in sarcomas and representatives from the National Cancer Institute.

The work that will be done after this morning is really coming from all of you.

TOP
Slide 4:

We hope that coming out of this meeting with the energies and the ideas that emerge in the breakout sessions, that we can broaden the interest in research in adult sarcomas, that we can further recruit more young investigators into the field, and that we can develop more ideas to stimulate increases in funding for sarcoma research, resulting in improved primary management and enhanced drug discovery.

TOP
Slide 5:

As I started by saying, our goal is to define the clinical research questions. Obviously, what we want to achieve is eventually the cure of all sarcoma patients.

As Scott began by saying, or included in his remarks, there is a website that will come out of this meeting.
We have also been in contact with a major journal in the clinical research, cancer translational research area.
We have indicated an interest in potentially publishing the results of this meeting for that purpose and, to help with that, we have engaged a medical editor, Dr. Jill Waalen. Let me introduce Jill.

We have engaged Dr. Waalen to help us put together the results of this. We asked each of the speakers to prepare something in advance to give Dr. Waalen, and then the breakout chairs will be working with the discussions and the transcripts, to incorporate all of this into a manuscript for submission.So, coming out of this and the energies and ideas which each of you put into it, we hope to have two major sources of expanded communication emerging, first the website and, second, a major publication of the proceedings of the meeting.

I will close at that point, before introducing Dr. Brennan to give his first talk. Let me ask whether there are any logistics questions that have emerged or anything that you wish to bring up at this point, addressed to either Dr. Saxman or myself?

Okay, the first speaker of the morning is Dr. Murray Brennan, who is the co-chair of this meeting. Dr. Brennan, as you know, is an individual who has maintained and led much of the work at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and maintaining the long tradition of excellence of research in sarcomas, for which Sloan-Kettering is well known.

Dr. Brennan is the chair of the Department of Surgery and will talk this morning about prognostic factors.

TOP