EADO Congress 2015

Highlights of EADO 2015

Prof Jean-Jacques Grob - Marseille University, Marseille, France

Now melanoma is massive news right now. What gave you the idea of putting together this particular mix, which is a real powerhouse of information about melanoma, here in Marseille at the EADO meeting?

Well, it’s not the first meeting of EADO, it’s been created nearly twenty years ago so it’s a well-known meeting in Europe dedicated to skin cancers. Of course we benefit as a specialty of the new progress in skin cancers and it’s a success just to tell you that we have more than 86 nationalities, 1,100 participants right now. All these people are interested in the new information they can get about melanoma. The specific profile of this meeting is, let’s say, to metabolise all the information which is coming with the best experts in the world doing the cooking with all that.

You certainly have the best experts here, could you distil for me what are the big themes? If you were to name one or two clinical topics that are emerging from this conference here right now, what are the key ones that you’d like to say?

The key ones are first to optimise the different strategies that we have now. We have pieces of information and we have to put all that together for the benefit of the patient, so that’s the first. Second, we need markers, whatever they are, to select in the whole population of melanoma patients the ones who should receive this treatment or this treatment. So far we are treating everybody the same way and it’s probably not the right way because we know that there are many different types of melanoma, from a different point of view, molecular point of view, immunological point of view, and these results in different aggressiveness of the disease, quite different aggressiveness kinetics, if you will.

And the key clinical areas that you think doctors should remember about real progress right now, what are they? What are the clinical messages coming out of this right now?

The clinical message is that we are progressing every year and whatever we think one year becomes wrong the year after, which is good news. That means that there is much progress; I’m not sure that it answers your question.

What are the big areas of progress, then, that doctors can now report to their patients?

Prolong their life, transform an acute deadly disease, melanoma, into a chronic one which is just what happens.

And how far do you think we have gone down the line of individualisation? You said that at the moment it’s a bit one size fits all.

So far we are not individualising the strategies, that’s the problem. We have to do so but we need much more information – biomarkers, different markers that we don’t have so far.

In conclusion, what would you like to leave us with, then?

We are living in a fantastic period as doctors. When I’ve been treating melanoma for thirty years and what we have lived in the last five years is… So I am enthusiastic because we are changing the prognosis of this disease. The next step, as I said, is individualisation of the strategies and moving, probably, these treatments which have been tested in advanced disease to earlier disease because obviously it’s better not to develop metastases so all these treatments should work earlier.