ASCO24 Updates: Dr. Andrea Vanzulli: New Response Criteria for Solid Tumors

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences in the field of oncology. This year, the meeting took place from May 31 to June 4 in Chicago, Illinois. The event gathers oncologists, researchers, and healthcare professionals from around the world to discuss the latest advancements in cancer research, treatment, and patient care. Keynote sessions, research presentations, and panel discussions are typically part of the agenda, providing attendees with valuable insights into emerging trends and innovations in oncology.

This year, OncoDaily was at ASCO 2024 for the first time covering the meeting on-site. We had the pleasure of interviewing researchers who summarized the highlights of their work.

In this video, Dr. Andrea Vanzulli, a third-year radiology resident at the National Cancer Institute in Milan, shared insights on ‘Redefining radiologic responses (RR) in solid tumors: Shall we brace ourselves for a post-RECIST era? Results from a randomized clinical trial (RCT) on neoadjuvant chemotherapy in high-risk soft-tissue sarcomas (HR-STS) of the trunk or extremities‘

My name is Andrea Vanzulli and I’m a third year resident physician in diagnostic and interventional radiology at the National Cancer Institute in Milan and this year I brought to ASCO a project which focuses on the design of new response criteria in solid tumors especially in the field of soft tissue sarcomas because we all know that resists have some limitations due to their rigid structures and categories and their somewhat arbitrary origins.

So we hereby presented a study that aims to identify new criteria to assess objective or radiologic responses in tumors especially in this subcategory of tumors and we demonstrated that there is an almost perfect inverse linear correlation between objective responses and clinical outcomes.

So this means that the more profound the radiologic objective response the better clinical outcomes and vice versa and this is very important because we know that within the SDE category of resist there is quite a wide clinical heterogeneity and so this new criteria could help us be more granular and have a more granular resolution to identify who patients are going to have better clinical outcomes and those who are not.

We really hope that these results would spark an open debate over the design of response criteria in solid tumors and hopefully help us tailor responses according to each patient in each specific disease. Thank you.

More videos and content from ASCO 2024 on OncoDaily.