Attending the ASTRO Annual Meeting

In late October, I attended the annual meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO), held live in a convention center near my home in Chicago. After participating in many oncology conferences on Zoom for the past 18 months, it was an almost surreal experience actually to be able to attend one in person!

Precautions and safety protocols

Lots of safety protocols were in place. Masks were required, of course, but in addition, seating was socially distanced and hand sanitizer was displayed prominently everywhere. Since this was a conference of oncology professionals, the vaccination rate was extremely high and I felt more comfortable than I do when going grocery shopping! All attendees got to choose among three different colors of badge lanyards — red, yellow, and green — to indicate how comfortable they were interacting with others. There were also hybrid options available for the meeting and presenters and attendees still had the choice of participating remotely from their homes or offices.

My first time attending ASTRO

This was the first time I have attended an ASTRO meeting and I was very impressed. For this year’s meeting, ASTRO focused on incorporating the patient voice throughout the meeting, including the Presidential Plenary on opening morning. Jill Feldman, my good friend, fellow advocate and co-founder of the EGFR Resisters, was one of the speakers in the Presidential Plenary. Her message was critical: real-world data should complement clinical trial data and be applied in the context of each patient’s life. As she said very eloquently, patients “are much more than statistics.”

Besides attending to cheer on Jill, I was interested in learning more about radiation oncology. I have not personally been treated with radiation, but as a stage IV surgical patient, I know that there is often a big controversy between surgeons and radiation oncologists over the best mode of treatment for certain tumors: removal vs. radiation therapy. I quickly realized as I was led around the conference by our radiation oncologist friend and host Dr. Drew Moghanaki, that I had lots to learn!

Learnings from ASTRO

I thought I would share just a few things that I discovered that might be helpful to others:

• CyberKnife, Gamma Knife, and SRS (stereotactic radiosurgery) do not all mean the same thing when referring to targeted radiation of a lesion in the brain. CyberKnife and Gamma Knife are different names of machines that are used to perform SRS. Many other, newer technologies were on display in the Exhibit Hall.
• SRS and SBRT (stereotactic body radiotherapy) both refer to high dose, targeted radiation that is given in fewer treatments than older radiation therapy. SRS treats the brain, usually in just one session. SBRT treats tumors elsewhere in the body, usually in 2 - 5 sessions. There’s lots of work and technologies being developed to continue to improve the accuracy of these systems and reduce side effects.
• SBRT is sometimes also called SABR (stereotactic ablative therapy).
• Physicists perform complex analyses on the radiation machines we use for treatments in order to program and recalibrate them, often in the evenings after everyone else leaves the treatment center.
• Radiation oncologists use specialized software and imaging to carefully pinpoint the exact location of radiation treatment. They need to take into account many things, such as the movement caused by breathing when mapping for lung cancer radiation.

Promise for tomorrow's cancer treatments

Overall, I learned that there are many facets of radiation oncology and experts are constantly analyzing and making improvements in order to help patients. The goal is to find the best treatments for patients that maintain or increase efficacy, while damaging less normal tissues and taking fewer sessions to complete. Many treatments such as immunotherapy hold great promise for synergies when combined with radiation.

Radiation oncology is a very complex area of medicine and as it can be used by patients in all stages of lung cancer, it is key to get advances explained in ways that are accessible to patients and can be easily understood. Encouraging more patient participation in meetings such as the ASTRO annual meeting will go a long way towards making that happen!