The changing landscape of the young investigator meeting at iwCLL 2015
Dr Giles Best - Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney, Australia
Prof Arnon Kater - Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
GB: Hello, and welcome to the iwCLL meeting in Sydney 2015. Professor Arnon Kater and I will be discussing the young investigators’ meeting that was held on Sunday 6th September. So, Arnon, what is YIM?
AK: So the young investigators’ meeting was actually started quite a while ago and it started actually as a side conference next to the iwCLL. In the beginning it was completely separated and more and more in the last years it has become more integrated in the big meeting. The whole purpose of it is that there are so many young people who are pretty inexperienced yet in CLL research, in actually doing all the great research and what the big people, the big guys, discuss in the meetings, at ASH, iwCLL. Actually that’s a lot of work that is done in the lab by the PhD students, by the first post-docs, and so what we wanted to do is we wanted to give a platform to those people that normally actually do the work but don’t get the platform to discuss their own data. The good thing is that if you can create a friendly environment where people can discuss or people can do their networking, which is much more difficult in a big meeting than in smaller meetings, then that’s kind of the purpose to have that in a separate meeting for young people.
GB: Certainly my experience, having presented at the past three meetings, is that it’s a very relaxed forum. It’s a one-to-one contact with the leaders in the field, it’s an excellent forum for young investigators to present their data.
AK: Right, so for a few years I was involved in the organisation and what we also tried is for the chairing of the sessions that it was not only the well-known people but it was kind of a combination of a more inexperienced with an experienced person doing the chairs, giving a lot of emphasis to the floor to actively ask questions there. I think also this year that was pretty well.
GB: Yes, so the organisation of this meeting, bringing in some new faces into the review panel for the abstracts, we had yourself, myself, Shih-Shih Chen, Jennifer Woyach and Xavier Badoux from Sydney. I think that it was a very well managed review process, the quality of the abstracts was extremely high. We had abstracts in every field, every subject theme area that was presented at the main meeting, so prognostication, novel therapies. We had a couple of talks on state of the art therapies.
AK: Yes, and disturbances, microenvironment
GB: And so really the difference between YIM and the main meeting, there really was no difference.
AK: No, and my idea is also every year it’s actually improving. So what I’ve said already is that it was completely separated but now it’s integrated, it’s on the same website and everything. I think what was very nice was, and I think it was one of the ideas of the Australian group, is that last year what you had was that there was a lot of overlap between the young investigators’ meeting and people also submitted their abstracts to the iwCLL. It was kind of a chance if you’re not presented there maybe you could present in the other meeting. This time, because of you, it was much better divided, that there was not so much overlap. Actually only the top three, if I resume correctly, were at a possibility to go over to the big meeting.
GB: Yes, that’s a good point. We had three abstracts, the three highest scored abstracts which we decided to take into the main meeting. Those three abstracts were then reviewed by the international panel for the main meeting and they still came out as being selected for oral presentations in the main meeting. I think that just demonstrates the quality of the abstracts that were submitted to the young investigators’ meeting was on a par with the main meeting. So, yes, I’d just like to reinforce the quality of the abstracts here, the quality of the meeting. There were 96 people registered for the young investigators which is equivalent to previous years. It was in a relatively smaller room so it was a very informal environment, a very relaxed environment for the young investigators.
AK: What I especially liked this time is that normally you get abstracts from the usual labs, from the big labs in the US and Europe and Australia. When I was reviewing the abstracts for the YIM surprisingly a lot of abstracts came from Southeast Asia where normally you don’t get so much from. I think also the quality was very good and these are the people that you don’t normally meet. I think also for them it was a great opportunity to present their data and to discuss this with the more known groups.
GB: Yes, and that’s something that was really… we made a point of in this meeting, being in the region that we’re in, to try and bring in some of the Asian haematologists, scientists that wouldn’t otherwise travel to a meeting in North America or in Europe. Their role in this meeting, the quality of the data that they presented was equivalent to… and the young investigators particularly. So, as part of the young investigators meeting we also had the talk by Finbarr Cotter and then the panel discussion with John Seymour and John Gribben.
AK: Yes, so all the editors of the journals that we like to get into The Journal of Haematology, Blood and Leukaemia and Lymphoma. I think that was indeed very good because I was sitting next to two of my PhD students and exactly the things that they struggle with, how you should put your language and do you put it in the first person or the third person and about who should be author, who shouldn’t be author, that was very well discussed, I think, by Finbarr in a very, very funny way actually. That was actually very good.
GB: Yes, it was supportive and it was… yes, there were some very good take home points, even for the more senior investigators to address when they submit their papers to these journals. We all strive to publish in Blood and so, yes, some of the things that John Gribben said. He was saying that you approach them as people and I’d seen these names before. And the other thing about the young investigators’ meeting in general, not only that panel discussion, was that there are names that you read as authors, senior authors, on papers you get to meet face to face and actually pick their brains as to how to get your papers published. You can present your data to them and get their feedback and it’s a very constructive sort of environment.
AK: Yes, and I thought very supportive of a lot people was that Kanti Rai was in there and actually he started the first young investigators’ meeting although at that moment also he was, I think, not a young investigator. But the fact that he was there and that actually told that his famous paper that he described the right criteria in the ‘70s that actually that was completely refused by one of the journals and that he completely had enough of it, put it in his drawer, didn’t want to do anything to do with it anymore. I think for a lot of people that was a very big recognition that they think their work is not good because it’s refused by a journal and actually if you hear that Kanti Rai’s famous paper was also turned down in the first place, I think that was very encouraging.
GB: Yes, very encouraging that senior people such as Kanti Rai, and they don’t come much more senior, have struggled with the same things that I struggle with. Yes, it was very good.
AK: Exactly, that was good.
GB: Then finally I just wanted to say, acknowledge really, the help that Michael Keating and the CLL Global Foundation gave us this year because obviously coming to Australia for the young investigators’ meeting is a long way to travel, it’s expensive for people to travel from Europe and North America and really without that help from the CLL Global this year we wouldn’t have been able to offer the scholarships. That’s really a new thing for the young investigators.
AK: Yes, I think it has been extremely important. So in the years, recent years, the grants that you get for travelling are actually getting smaller and smaller. For PhD students especially those just came in, actually, and under the years of 40 they don’t publish so much because they’re just starters. It’s pretty much impossible to come to these kinds of expensive meetings where you have to travel a lot. The fact that CLL Global acknowledges that those people are actually important and are the future of CLL research and CLL treatment, I think that it makes a big, big difference. And also give them a very warm welcome that indeed it’s very much appreciated that you do this work and if you come over the world to travel here to give your presentation.
GB: Yes, and the fact that as a meeting as a whole the attendance, not only for young investigators but for the whole meeting, has been on a par with previous meetings. I think it really highlights how significant the iwCLL is to researchers in the field. As you say, the support offered by the CLL Global really recognises the role that young investigators do play in the future of research and clinical development.
AK: Yes, very good. And I hope that next time it will be in Germany. We always do the young investigators’ meeting every year, it’s either part of the iwCLL, which is every two years, or it’s part of the international German Study Group meeting. So I hope we get the same crowd and we get the same people involved and we get another successful meeting next year, I think it’s in Cologne.
GB: Yes, very good.
