Letter from the President
Kelly Shanahan, M.D.
I swear these months fly by faster and faster! I hope where you live spring is firmly established, on the way to summer; here in Tahoe it was 70 degrees 2 days ago and now I’m watching snow fall outside my office window. It’s a lot like life with MBC – things can change on a dime.
This morning the METAvivor Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) met to review the 200 letters of intent (LOIs) that were submitted this grant cycle; like last year, this is double the number we usually get and reflects the uncertainty around federal research dollars. As Dr. Stuart Martin, a long-time member of the SAB, put it, “METAvivor is doing outstanding work to help metastasis research keep moving forward during this especially challenging time for research”. Next step is we will invite those with the most exciting, impactful ideas to submit full applications. Those will once again be reviewed by scientific experts and patient advocate reviewers (PARs). If you are interested in becoming a reviewer, you can click here – we need scientists and patient advocate reviewers (PARs)! We also need money to fund research, so as always, I’m asking you to donate!
ASCO, the big oncology conference that covers all cancers, starts later this week in Chicago. It is massive, overwhelming, exhausting, and exhilarating. Yours truly has been invited to speak (on the big stage!!) in a session Sunday 5/31 at 9:45 AM Central called “Elevating the Patient Voice: Choosing the Right Patient-Centered Endpoints in Modern Clinical Trials” and my 12 minute talk is “How to design trials that are meaningful to people with cancer: ask us, or to quote the Spice Girls, “yo, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want””.
In mid-June, I’ll be heading to Minnesota to speak again, at the Hormel Institute’s Global Cancer Consortium on advances in metastasis research. Not to sound like a broken record, but I’ll again be urging researchers to build a bigger table and pull up a seat for us, the experts in living with metastatic cancer. Our OG grant recipient and SAB member, Dr. Danny Welch will be giving a keynote talk on the hallmarks of metastasis at this meeting, so METAvivor will be well represented. If anyone lives near Austin, MN, let me know!
I encourage you all to check out the Live from Stage 4 podcasts. These podcasts provide “news for us, by us”, as the tagline says. From symptom spotlights to interviews with some of the giants in oncology to updates from conferences (and the occasional salivating over “Heated Rivalry” ), the episodes are informative and lively. METAvivor board members Janice Cowden, Lynda Weatherby, and I were on a recent episode talking about the FDA’s ODAC (Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee) vote to not recommend approving switching from an AI + CDK4/6 inhibitor to investigational camizestrant + the same CDK4/6 inhibitor if an ESR1 mutation develops before imaging shows progression. There will be a follow-up episode very soon where oncologists talk about this, and how we need to incorporate new technology into regulatory decisions. The European Medicines Agency Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use, the equivalent of the FDA ODAC, did recommend approving camizestrant based on the SERENA-6 trial, and as I write this, the FDA has announced that they are continuing to review the camizestrant data, so who knows, we may have another drug for ER+, HER2- MBC with an ESR1 mutation soon.
Finally, to end with hope of new treatments, the FDA in May alone approved 1) new drug Veppanu (vepdegestrant) for ER+, HER2- MBC with an ESR1 mutation and 2) Datroway (datopotamab deruxtecan, aka dato-DXd) as first line treatment for people with metastatic TNBC who are not eligible for immunotherapy. Plus, they expanded the indications for Enhertu (trastuzumab deruxtecan, aka TDXd) in the early stage HER2+ setting, to lower the risk that those people ever develop MBC. And there will probably be additional approvals this year, as there are some promising studies being presented at ASCO.
Ok, this has been long enough! Thank you for reading, and please keep your fingers crossed for me that 1) I represent the MBC community well on the ASCO stage, and 2) that my 2nd set of scans on a clinical trial are good – I fly right from ASCO to Nashville for the scans.
-Kelly