ASCO President Dr. Lynn Schuchter on Her Top News From the 2024 Meeting

Lynn Schuchter, MD, director of the Tara Miller Melanoma Center and Madlyn and Leonard Abramson Professor of Clinical Oncology at Penn Medicine and 2023-2024 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) president, discusses her top abstracts from the 2024 annual meeting.

As an oncologist specializing in melanoma, Schuchter considers the results from the phase 3 NADINA trial (NCT04949113) investigating neoadjuvant ipilimumab (Yervoy) plus nivolumab (Opdivo) vs standard adjuvant nivolumab to be practice-changing.

Schuchter's presidential theme for the 2024 meeting was "The Art and Science of Cancer Care: From Comfort to Cure," which was cemented by another featured plenary abstract, "Comparative effectiveness trial of early palliative care delivered via telehealth versus in person among patients with advanced lung cancer."

Here, Schuchter details these abstracts and why she considers them her top news from the meeting.

Transcription:

0:05 | There were 2 in the plenary. So the NADINA clinical trial was presented that as a clinical trial for patients with stage III melanoma where the lymph node is palpable, and that study is practice-changing. It showed that a combination of immunotherapy, ipilimumab and nivolumab, was very effective. And maybe now our patients will only need 2 cycles of treatment. So as I said, in the opening in the plenary session, when I left last week, I gave 1 medication. When I have clinic on Thursday, I will be approaching patients with a different option for them to consider. So I focus on melanoma, and so that's practice changing for me.

0:52 | And then, you know, my big theme of the meeting has been the importance of integration of palliative care into all of oncology care. And having the plenary session of palliative care paper was exciting. And that paper showed that we can just as easily deliver palliative care through telemedicine as we can do with an in in person visit, we really hope that that means that palliative care will be available more often and more easily accessible for patients and so that I think, showing that a conversation that we thought maybe need to take to take place in person doesn't need to be the we can get the same benefits through a telemedicine visit was important result to see it sort of does like you would think that would work but you know, you need to do a study and show that you don't miss something in the sort of secret sauce of what a palliative care consultation can do. So I hope there's much more wide adoption of this and for our palliative care physicians. This allows them to have greater access to patients and there's not enough palliative care physician. So this is a greater opportunity to have them really see the patients that need to be seen.