Maryam Lustberg: Reflecting on Two Years of Achievements and Shaping Future Plans

Each year, Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer (MASCC) joins forces with the International Society for Oral Oncology (ISOO) to host the preeminent international meeting on supportive care in cancer. This multinational and interdisciplinary meeting brings together professionals and trainees from diverse fields to engage, collaborate and learn.

The 2024 Annual Meeting was held in collaboration with the French affiliate organization AFSOS, and took place in the charming city of Lille, France, June 27-29.

Dr. Maryam Lustberg is a medical oncologist and a leading expert in breast cancer care. She holds several key positions at Smilow Cancer Hospital and Yale Cancer Center, including Director of the Center for Breast Cancer and Chief of Breast Medical Oncology. She also serves as an Associate Professor of Medicine (Medical Oncology)at Yale. Dr. Lustberg’s research focuses on improving long-term outcomes for breast cancer patients who experience treatment-related side effects.

At the MASCC 2024 meeting, Dr. Maryam Lustberg—Immediate past president of MASCC and a prominent medical oncologist—sat down for an interview with OncoDaily. This marked the first time we covered the event on-site. Joining her was Dr. Martin Harutyunyan, who shared valuable insights into supportive cancer care.

Hello, I’m Dr. Maryam Lustberg from the United States. I’m the immediate past president of MASCC and I am talking to you from our annual international meeting in Lille, France.

Over the last two years, during my presidency, I have worked to increase our global collaborations with other international societies, including the Society of Integrative Oncology, as well as the International Cardio-Oncology Society. We have also been fortunate enough to have several new affiliates join MASCC, including from South Korea, as well as the Netherlands and many others. And we’ve had many centers of excellence join MASCC.

We continue to broaden our membership around the globe. We have focused on increasing membership to patient partners and advocates, and improving our education services for patients and caregivers around the globe. We have also focused on investigating disparities in access to supportive care services around the globe, and working collaboratively on finding new solutions for these.

The study groups of MASCC focus on various topics in supportive care and have a number of topics including neutropenia, neurologic complications, survivorship, palliative care, anti-emetics, and the list goes on. And we encourage our members to be actively involved in study groups to envision new studies and collaborations.

I’m most actively involved in the neurological complications group where we conducted an international survey of patients and their experience with neurotoxicity and chemotherapy-induced neuropathy.

We have reported these findings which have highlighted that patients continue to experience persistent chronic neuropathy across multiple cancer types and we are continuing to investigate additional interventions to support our patients.

I’ve also been active with the oncodermatology as well as survivorship groups.

I think overall we are continuing to hear from patients, caregivers, and clinicians that all of us believe that supportive care is a central part of delivering holistic cancer care. What we continue to struggle with is how do we achieve this? How do we seamlessly integrate supportive care throughout the continuum of care from day one of diagnosis as patients are receiving their cancer care?

So this is the commitment of MASCC to continue to work on this area to work towards solutions so that we can continue to improve the experience of patients both during and after cancer treatment.

More videos and content from MASCC 2024 on OncoDaily.