Looking forward to my first EANO conference

Keeping up with the latest research at the European Association of Neuro-Oncology's annual meeting.

This week I’ll be travelling to Prague for the European Association of Oncology’s annual conference. There will be a broad range of topics covered, including glioma biology, novel therapeutic targets, advances in immunotherapy, and emerging metabolic and molecular insights into brain tumours.

I’m sure I’ll find some of the talks both enlightening and frustrating in equal measure - for various reasons I won’t go into now - but overall it should be an interesting few days. I’m fairly confident I won’t be questioning my life choices halfway through the conference. I’m actually really looking forward to it. Going through the conference schedule, I’m encouraged by the fact that many of the sessions align with my research interests, which I feel is a positive sign that we’re heading in the right direction. - even if our perspectives differ somewhat.

However the conference goes, I’m sure I’ll enjoy the trip as I have a real fondness for Czechia (aka The Czech Republic), having visited many times over the years.

EANO is probably the biggest conference I will have attended. With so many talks and sessions running simultaneously across different rooms, I’ll need to be picky about which ones I focus on.

I’ll be around for 4 days, so I have some time to network and reflect on each talk. I want to make the most of my time by highlighting any observations or novel treatments that look promising and could have a more immediate impact on patients, especially where there is minimal toxicity. I don’t just owe it to myself, but also the people that follow me and listen to what I have to say. I’m eternally grateful for that opportunity. Too many lives are impacted by this disease, and the situation is just getting worse as time goes on.

With that in mind, I’ve already highlighted a few talks that most pique my interest and align most closely with my research focus. These include sessions on brain tumour metabolism, the gut microbiome, immunotherapies, and novel therapeutic strategies that show strong potential for efficacy and safety but have yet to be fully realised.

I’d like to share a selection of talks I plan to attend here, and I’d love to hear your views on what you would like me to expand upon from what I’ve learned, or to ask relevant questions during the conference. It would also be great if you could let me know what you would me to cover in more detail.

As a bonus, I’m thankful that there will be other patient advocates at this conference to compare notes with and offer our unique perspective. I would love to hear more from them and relay what we discussed. Some of these individuals are also academics or involved in healthcare in some capacity. They inspire me and we can be an incredible team if we work together.

Sessions I plan on attending and engaging with where appropriate:

The following are a series of talks from the conference schedule I believe I would find most interest in.

Coincidentally, I actually recently submitted a paper featuring topics in the ‘Systemic factors impacting on brain tumours’ session as part of a broader investigation on allostatic mechanisms in the context of ketosis to support my PhD. I can’t say as much as I would like to on the paper, but will once it’s published. I just wanted to give special attention to these topics because I feel they play incredibly important roles in progression free and overall survival in brain cancer, along with treatment susceptibility. - especially with my focus on treatments that target metabolic defects in cancer.

Day 1 - Selected talks on:

The brain tumour microenvironment, systemic factors, immunotherapy strategies, metabolomics, imaging metabolism, strategies for crossing the blood brain barrier to deliver treatments, “finding a cure for glioblastoma”.

Day 2-4 - Selected talks on:

Immunotherapy, long-term effects on quality of life, sequencing, brain tumour related epilepsy, the tumour microenvironment and the significance of IDH status in survival and making treatment decisions.

I also plan to attend some workshop discussion sessions, which I have not listed.

I’m keen to hear your thoughts on these topics and to understand what people would most like to know about them, or others I have not covered here. This is a short post, but I have been hard at work on a number of different projects lately. I appreciate all feedback. Thank you.