John, we’re here in the city of Liverpool and at this wonderful convention centre. I think you had a stake in actually making this convention centre happen and that, of course, gave rise to this gynaecologic cancer meeting right now.
Absolutely. I first ran a small meeting in 2008, the year that Liverpool was European Capital of Culture, and we’d been planning a bid to bring a bigger international meeting here for several years and we were very fortunate, about eighteen months ago, to get the go-ahead that ESGO was coming here. So we’ve been planning it, really, most of that time.
Tell me about what’s on the agenda right here because it’s quite a busy meeting.
It is and we’ve got almost 2,500 delegates, I think it’s 2,406 is the final number, and we’ve introduced a number of innovative features. In addition to the usual presidential sessions and the late breaking abstracts when we present new data, we had a nursing seminar on the first day and we also had the second patient seminar from ESGO because we feel it’s very important to reach out to all these different groups of people and truly become, as we say, the European voice of gynaecological oncology.
And you’ve got something called an e-academy, what’s that?
That is another new development. We’ve got some research initiatives, one of which is called Integrate which brings together all the research organisations in gynaecological cancer. But the e-academy is linked to that in that all the material from not just this congress but earlier ESGO congresses and the other workshops that we do and the various publications will all go on to an interactive website which will be accessible to ESGO members and we feel will be a major feature for the development of the society. There is no substitute for coming to a meeting and interacting and meeting all your colleagues but the reality is that not everybody can get to these meetings and you can’t get every single time. So we feel that it’s very much a sort of partner to the biennial face to face meetings and we’re going on to link next year to have a state of the art meeting in Turin.
What is the importance of this sort of meeting and the kinds of things you’re doing to busy cancer doctors in day to day clinical situations?
We’ve very much tried to stress that. I’m chairing a session on Monday evening when we review the new information that has come out in 2013. Now we’ve had three positive trials in ovarian cancer and one in cervical cancer this year, introducing new drugs in addition to existing agents in treating these diseases. In addition to what’s been presented in new information at this meeting, we’re going to ask some experts to review what happened at ASCO and ESMO and SGO which are the three other big international meetings of 2013. Because this is going to be the last meeting until the next ones in the spring of 2014 so we thought it was important to look back and just take stock of what have really been real advances. 2013 has been a very good year.
So which sorts of cancer doctors and cancer clinicians need to come to your meeting, then?
Sometimes we divide them into three bands. There are the trainees who make up about 600 of our overall membership of 1,600; these trainees are usually quite experienced doctors but they’re usually for a period of three or four years on top of their basic training they specialise in gynaecological cancer. And then there’s the large group, I wouldn’t like to specify the exact age, but the middle range of people who are in staff grade positions, they’ve been practising for anything between five and fifteen years, and we feel it’s very important to market our content to them. As I say, maybe people will not come every two years but certainly every second meeting or so we would like to see all the members and probably 1,000 of the delegates here are actually not members of the society but come from a total of 81 countries. Then, on top of that, there’s a small number, maybe one hundred, two hundred people, who we regard as the key opinion leaders and tend to be the speakers at our congress. And they tend to be in the older age range, if you like. So we try to cater for all these different groups besides now the nurses because, certainly in Western parts of Europe, trained nurses are very much becoming part of the multidisciplinary team that manages cancer and, in many cases, also provides that vital link back to our patient groups because we need feedback from the patients as to what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and we need them to help advocate upwards to local, national or, in some cases, international organisations to get more resources for treating our patients.
And if there’s one keynote theme that you’d like to leave cancer clinicians with coming out of this meeting, what might that be?
Very difficult, really, to pick from the number of areas. I would probably say two things: one that there’s continuing advances in the treatment of ovarian cancer, particularly in terms of the new drugs. Secondly, in endometrial cancer, which has been a bit of a Cinderella over the last twenty or so years, not so many advances, not so much interest from the pharmaceutical industry and not so much interest from investigators. But that has probably changed in the last five years or so. I think it’s going to become a major problem, certainly for Western societies, because there is a link with obesity and diabetes and cardiovascular disease, for example. So I think we need to get a lot more trials in progress in this disease and it’s very reassuring that there are a number of investigators and new information and research going on in this disease to help categorise it better and divide it up into groups and then we can work on how to do the trials to develop the better treatments.
John, thank you very much.
