Hi Laurie,
I attended last evening. Here are some of my notes: The theme last night was 'hope'. Mel Foundation of NE started with a short video of 4 survivors who gave testimony of their journey with melanoma. Dr. Lawrence started by providing a slide deck presentation on "Melanoma 2010 – Targeted Therapy – Just the Beginning" which noted the amount of recent progress since 2009 in development of melanoma trials/treatment, including overviews of BRAF/NRAS/C-Kit mutations, PLX-4032, GSK112012 (MEK inhibitor), and mention of possible combinations of these in the future (some very early Phase IB/II trials). Dr. Hodi (DFCI) didn't use a slide deck but spoke on the subject of Immunotherapy focusing on Ipilimumab (what is it, how it works, current status of FDA approval process). He mentioned that there were about a 1/2 dozen new drugs in the pipeline with even more still in the planning stages – again hope for the future. Dr. Mahadevan from BIDMC provided the Radiation Oncologist viewpoint of changes in radiation therapy over the years and provided info on ablation, sterostatic radiation (typically for brain mets) and for Sterostatic Body Radiotherapy (SBRT) – when to use it, etc. This is often under the names: Novalis, Trilogy, CyberKnife (which he has most experience with). He also discussed side effects of radiation. About an hour of the symposium was spent with Q&A to the panel of 3 doctors. A number of great questions from the audience. I was happy to hear a brief positive mention by Dr. Lawrence on the early phase trial (Adoptive Cell Transfer of Mart1/Melan-A) run by Dr. Marc Butler that I was a participant in back in early 2008. This was brought up when an individual was asking for an update on the NCI Cell Transfer trails. Hope this helps…..
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