The highlight of this conference is that a group who have been involved in the formation of this conference we realised one thing, that there is a lack of a good platform for a scientific forum in oncology in India. People want a platform to present the data; somebody should listen to them and also somebody should tell them what’s new. That platform interaction has been on a smaller scale but on a massive scale, with all the specialists concerned, for example in cancer we have the imaging people, that is the people who do the scans, the people who do the pathological diagnosis, the people who do the counselling, the people who administer the treatment, that’s the nurses, the people who do the psycho-oncology, the people who are involved in the genetics. So every person has been brought in over here and apart from the people who are giving the care we also have the patients, the caregivers, also the volunteers who work for the non-governmental organisations, the cancer NGOs, provide, talking to the patients. All of them have come here and that’s the unique thing about this conference.
Has there been a particular topic at the conference that stood out?
What we have done is we have taken all the common cancers, for example the thoracic lung cancer, the oesophageal cancer, so we have made tracks for each group of cancers like gynaecological cancers, the breast cancer, the GI cancers and all that. And all of them have been covered; in GI cancer, stomach cancer, the colonic cancer, and all cancers have been covered, that is in the tracks, so that’s one important thing. Then these tracks also have an organised… in the morning sessions we have multidisciplinary because no cancer is treated by a single specialist, it could be a surgeon, a medical oncologist, a radiation oncologist, everyone together. So we had multidisciplinary sessions in the morning and in the afternoon the radiation oncologists would discuss about the type of radiations that they give or they could give in the afternoons; similarly medical oncologists, they would go into their field area of speciality in the afternoons, in the morning it’s a multidisciplinary, that is one important thing. And then in the morning from 8 to 9 we had very, very interesting case discussions. So we tried to bring in everything possible – how you manage a patient in the morning, how you manage as a team and then how you do your speciality in the afternoons. Then we brought in the nurses, we had all of these I just mentioned to you, the genetics, psycho-oncologists, everyone. So like that we have had the sessions.
We have done three or four important things to highlight the research done from India. One is we have invited the papers in the form of abstracts. So a panel of judges went through them, there were 1,200 papers submitted this year, it’s a record for 1,200 papers and we have accepted them and then we have screened them. Some of them are fantastic; there’s a panel of judges who are going to look into these posters and then judge which are good. Then we also invited landmark papers from India, that’s something unique which we have done this year and we have got fifty landmark papers which have changed the way that we treat the cancers, the way we look at the cancer, the way we manage the cancers in whatever way, the way we prevent the cancers. And these are all based on cost efficacy applicable to India for Indian cancers. So those landmark papers, we had fifty entries which is a remarkable thing. And fifty entries, that means fifty research papers which have been published from India. They have made a change in the cancer, we have invited them, from them we have selected five most important ones and one of them happened to have been presented in ASCO this year in June which was official by all world leaders. So the research which is done in India we’re trying to highlight, that’s what we have done this year.
