[music] ASCO: You’re listening to a podcast from Cancer.Net. This cancer information website is produced by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, known as ASCO, the world’s leading professional organization for doctors who care for people with cancer. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Cancer research discussed in this podcast is ongoing, so the data described here may change as research progresses. The European Society for Medical Oncology 2019 Congress was held in Barcelona, Spain, from September 27 to October 1. In this podcast, Dr. Ricardo Cubedo shares highlights from the meeting, including treatment advances in ovarian and lung cancer. He also discusses a new type of clinical trial known as “basket trials” and the ways they are changing the shape of cancer research. Dr. Cubedo is the Head of Sarcomas and Hereditary Cancer with the Medical Oncology Service at MD Anderson Cancer Center Madrid. He is also a member of the Cancer.Net Editorial Board. ASCO would like to thank Dr. Cubedo for discussing this research. Dr. Ricardo Cubedo: Good day, everybody. My name is Dr. Ricardo Cubedo. I am a medical oncologist from Madrid, Spain, from MD Anderson Cancer Center Madrid, and I was among the 25,000 attendees coming from all around the world, attending the last European Society for Medical Oncology Meeting, which took place between 27 September and 1st of October in Barcelona, which is a very beautiful Spanish city by the Mediterranean sea. We had a record-breaking 3,900 scientific communications, so you can bet that there is a lot to choose from, but I have chosen for you 3 topics. Two of them are relevant on their own, and very important results, and the last 1 I think it goes beyond the results themselves, changing the way we figure out things in order to fight cancer. The first item is the results of the PAOLA-1 trial, focused on advanced ovarian cancer patients. You know that ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecological cancers, because we cannot cure it when it is diagnosed too late to remove it, usually because it is too widespread within the belly. Nowadays, those patients rely on chemotherapy in order to stop the disease, control their symptoms, and live longer. We usually use chemotherapeutics based on platinum as front-line treatment, which are just too toxic to use all the time. So the way we do it, we give the chemotherapy for some months, then stop, then used again when the disease starts progressing and the patient becomes symptomatic. Those months between one chemo period and the next one, are precious for ovarian cancer patients, because they can enjoy them free from both the burden of progressing disease and the side effects of platinum chemotherapy. The new drug that was the center of the PAOLA-1 trial is called olaparib. It is a new non-chemotherapy drug that targets directly the DNA of the tumor cells. And what it does is to prevent the DNA in the tumor cell from repairing itself when it is damaged, and that ultimately leads to the death of the tumor cell. What PAOLA-1 researchers really wanted to know is if olaparib, the new drug, was useful to delay progression once the disease was already stabilized by chemotherapy, giving patients a longer period free from chemo between 1 treatment and the next 1. That seemed a good idea, because olaparib is given as pills and has few side effects. 800, more or less, ovarian cancer patients were recruited into the trial from several countries all across Europe and were divided into 2 groups. Group number 1 were treated in the standard fashion: that is, chemotherapy until the tumor stopped, and then, maintenanc