The EORTC, as you know, has conducted academic research through Europe in a multidisciplinary way, meaning that today you have a group of surgeons, radiation oncologists, medical oncologists, pathologists, whatever. We believe it’s important to unite forces with a common subject, which is the patient.
Cancer research is not an easy field, there is a lot of competition. So today we are here to see how we can keep the organisation at the cutting edge and mostly trying to put everybody around the table and see what we can improve, which direction we should go, and also present some of the projects we’ve been conducting like a very important project which is called the Young Career Investigator which is basically trying to find the next generation of leaders, present them to the public and hopefully generate new enthusiasm for the years to come.
What are the strengths of EORTC now?
EORTC is an old lady now and it’s been fifty years old, more than fifty years old, and you can’t count the number of places and indications where we’ve been changing the way we treat patients by providing mostly guidance, large clinical trials showing how you can improve quality of life and survival of the patients. My personal background is I’m a genitourinary surgeon so when applied to the field of prostate and bladder cancer, for instance, we’ve been showing the importance of adjuvant radiotherapy after surgery. We’ve been showing the importance of treating superficial bladder cancer with BCG; we’ve been showing the importance of neoadjuvant chemotherapy.
One of the common points of these trials is that they are always multidisciplinary so it’s when you unite surgeons, radiation oncologists and medical oncologists together then you can create additional value.
What are the main goals of the EGAM meeting?
The number one goal today is education and direction. Education about what we do because EORTC is a specific environment where you have a headquarters which is made of people whose job is to conduct clinical trials and a very large group of physicians who actually hold the science and the patients, which are those who need to guide the organisation, telling us which way we should go. We usually meet in small silos.
Today is really a big meeting where we can all meet together, interact with other professionals, other groups, other specialties, but also educate these people about what are our capabilities so that they can know a vision or they could use that capacity for the service of the patient.
What are the future goals for EORTC?
First of all the future of the organisation is to cope with dimensions that were not necessarily that important fifteen years ago but are now of rapidly growing importance such as value base, optimisation of the treatment, how can we get the best of the treatment by not necessarily increasing the cost. Then also tackling very important topics like innovation, for instance proton therapy and radiation oncology, or precision medicine, so incorporating genomics into the diagnostic and treatment of patients. So these are the number one challenges we need to tackle for the next 5-10 years.
