Douglas Flora, Executive Medical Director of Yung Family Cancer Center at St. Elizabeth Healthcare, President-Elect of the Association of Cancer Care Centers, and Editor in Chief of AI in Precision Oncology, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“There has never been a better day in human history to have cancer.
And, if you’ve ever questioned how much your oncologist cares for and about you, the video linked below may be surprising and reassuring. An oncologist’s applause is a rare, closely guarded currency. The culture of our field selects for stoicism – a professional insulation built over decades of us having to deliver impossibly hard news over the years in so many quiet rooms. But last weekend, in Chicago, at the largest cancer meeting in the world, that 40-year silence evaporated for 42 joyous seconds.
I am just getting back from that meeting and so hopeful after seeing accelerating progress. Three standing ovations for new trial results. This one was the biggest one: after a cancer researcher showed us a survival curve for a new drug in metastatic pancreatic cancer, the auditorium of 9,000 clinicians and researchers came apart. People didn’t just applaud; they cheered, rose to their feet, and many wept. I’m tearing up typing this right now. This drug that doubled overall survival and cut the risk of death by 60% isn’t just a clinical milestone. It is a grand slam against a target the consensus had long declared ‘undruggable.’
The forty-two seconds of cheering in that hall weren’t just about the data. The data was simply the occasion. What filled that room was the sudden, collective release of four decades of clinical frustration – the accumulated weight of every conversation that went badly, and every patient who ran out of options before we ran out of time.
Thank you to all of you here that support cancer research at St. Elizabeth Healthcare, at The Yung Family Cancer Center, Conquer Cancer, the American Cancer Society, or anywhere else.
A more personal thanks is due to the many patients on my personal page who consented to enroll on clinical trials over the last 20 years with me – this is how we make critical progress, step by step. There is no longer such thing as an ‘undruggable’ target.
I’ll cheer for this sort of result every single day.
(See my deeper thoughts on the significance of this, see my article link in the comment section below)”
Other articles featuring Douglas Flora on OncoDaily.