By Peter J. O’Dwyer, MD (left)
and Mitchell D. Schnall, MD, PhD

Each year, as spring draws to a close and summer approaches, we emerge from a whirlwind of meeting activity that necessitates a period of reflection. Of course, the recent ASCO Annual Meeting comes to mind—but also our semi-annual Group Meeting, which serves as a bedrock for all we do in ECOG-ACRIN. The recent spring meeting produced our highest attendance to date, surpassing even pre-COVID totals. The enthusiasm was palpable, with several sessions so well-attended that overflow rooms would have been a welcome addition.

As usual, the two plenary sessions were highlights: the Comis Symposium featured a series of talks on novel technologies for guiding and delivering cancer treatment, while the General Session offered previews of two ECOG-ACRIN studies recently presented at ASCO. Of special significance, however, was a focus on health equity in honor of the late Dr. Edith P. Mitchell. The Health Equity Committee Session departed from its usual format to facilitate timed round table discussions between ECOG-ACRIN mentors and alumni of the Mitchell Health Equity Travel Scholarship Program (pictured with committee chair Dr. Melissa Simon). Dr. Mitchell’s life and legacy was also a focus of the second half of the General Session.

At the start of the TMIST Update and Education Session, study chair Dr. Etta D. Pisano noted that the trial was about 150 participants shy of 100,000 enrollments—a milestone that it reached later in May. Since opening, TMIST has expanded to 130 participating clinical sites in the US and abroad, and the study is recruiting one of the most racially diverse populations of any NCI trial. We look forward to sustaining this momentum and completing enrollment, as TMIST will provide much-needed data to move breast cancer screening and health equity forward.

Additionally, ECOG-ACRIN’s recently established Advanced Practice Providers (APP) Working Group (pictured) under the leadership of Drs. Al B. Benson and Bridget O’Brien Fagan is developing apace, and participants shared updates and best practices to engage APPs more robustly in clinical research at the spring meeting. “Hot off the presses” was a preview copy of the Advanced Practice Provider Clinical Trials Research Manual now available via our EA Members’ website. ECOG-ACRIN was proud to play a lead role in providing resources and editorial support for the manual, which was received with much excitement among attendees at the APP Working Group session and is part of a larger effort within the NCTN and NCORP to elevate the role of the APP in NCI-sponsored research.

Finally, we are delighted to note that another successor to NCI-MATCH, the myeloMATCH precision medicine trial, opened last month. MyeloMATCH is a group of clinical trials for people with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) or myelodysplastic syndromes. These trials are testing new precision medicine treatments for patients with myeloid cancers. In this issue, we highlight myeloMATCH treatment trial MM10OA-EA02 for older patients with newly diagnosed FLT3-mutated AML. Like ComboMATCH, the first step to participating in myeloMATCH is to enroll in the myeloMATCH Master Screening and Reassessment Protocol, coordinated by our colleagues at SWOG.

Read the June 2024 issue here.