«An absolutely fruitful meeting»

The 3^rd International Lung Cancer Summit (ILCS), which took place in October, was again held in a cooperative, friendly atmosphere, in which knowledge was shared and hypotheses were lively discussed. Major debated topics were targeted therapy and immune therapy. Wetalked to Prof. Solange Peters, MD PhD, who was chairing the summit together with Alfredo Addeo, MD, about her personal highlights.

You have been chairing the ILCS for the third time, together with your colleague Dr. Addeo. Why do you think this summit is of paramount importance?

S. Peters: In my opinion, there are three main aspects which make the summit especially important. Firstly, we wanted to be very diverse in representation of the faculty. Our goal was to invite speakers of different ages and at different stages of their academic career – from established key opinions leaders to younger faculty members – and from as many different countries as possible. Additionally, female oncologists should be represented equally. The invited speakers should be representative stakeholders of the field of oncology, with the aim to really create fruitful and inspiring discussions and debates.

This brings me to the second aspect: We aimed at creating a friendly, cooperative atmosphere, where data are being discussed and opinions are being formed more than in other meetings and congresses, where people are usually quite busy. At the ILCS, we offer a space where people can go into deep discussions for each of the presented topics without having any limitations – for this summit is about science and how to bring this scientific progress to our patients.

Scientific progress and innovation – this is the third aspect which we always like to put our focus on. Of course, one can hardly cover the whole field of thoracic oncology, but we always ask our speakers to bring both their most important and innovative topics up to discussion at the ILCS.

To put it in a nutshell, in my opinion the winning combination of diversity, debate and innovation makes the ILCS quite unique.

What were your personal highlights of the summit?

S. Peters: This is quite difficult to say, as there was no chapter being discussed that was not about innovation and perspective. Besides these enriching presentations, I especially enjoyed all the discussions, I think the atmosphere was amazing, how people were interacting, thinking and joking together. The spontaneous and intuitive nature of the meeting – many young academic people discussing – it was not boring for a second! The tone of friendship, where people are happy to meet – this is what makes the ILCS unique.

What do you think are the most exciting developments in treatment of lung cancer and generally in thoracic oncology?

S. Peters: In the last 10 to 15 years, there have been two main promising chapters in treatment of thoracic cancers.

Firstly, there is a focus on how to better describe cancers by finding and specifying oncogenic pathways, which has opened the field to characterizing oncogene addiction. In discovering driver oncogenes in several (sub-)types of cancer and defining drugs to act on these targets, we finally have the possibility to specifically treat patients according to the genetic subtypes of their cancer. The pharmacological design of these drugs is amazing: drugs for almost all driver mutations known are available and they are covering better and better their different targets.

Secondly, of course immunotherapy needs to be mentioned. It works according to a completely different paradigm: The focus is not on the biology of the cancer itself, but on the immune system and on trying to understand how to reactivate its response against cancer. The progress is very promising, we are covering almost the whole field of oncology now – a wide range of disease entities and states, not only metastatic, but also early disease.

What are the current challenges in treating lung cancer?

S. Peters: To my mind, the greatest challenge is and will be perfectly designing one treatment strategy for one patient. We need to get better and better at finding the right treatment for the individual patient at the right time. To do so, dependable biomarkers and precise bioengineering of new compounds are the key.

What will the summit focus on next year?

S. Peters: Of course, we will cover targeted therapy and immunotherapy again next year. Potentially, we will focus a little bit more on the curative intent and on early disease, as that is getting more and more important.

As the ILCS was once more an absolutely fruitful summit, the format should basically stay the same. However, I hope that all the speakers will be able to travel to Switzerland next year. In my experience, the more you put people face to face, side by side, the better the debates can take place. Even if we all got used to virtual meetings by now due to the Covid-19-pandemic, it is never completely the same.

Additionally, I would love to be able to win the pharma industry to grant some fellowships for our speakers. As one of our major goals is to cover diversity and we think it is wonderful to have promising young oncologists coming from far abroad, it would be gorgeous to convince some of our sponsors to create fellowships for some of them.

Thank you very much for talking to us!

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