Host Dr. John Sweetenham, associate director for Clinical Affairs at UT Southwestern Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Center, and Dr. Robert Carlson, CEO of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN), discuss novel therapies and compelling health equity research featured at the 2022 NCCN Annual Conference.   Transcript:   Dr. John Sweetenham: Hello, I'm John Sweetenham, the associate director for Clinical Affairs at UT Southwestern's Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center, and host of the ASCO Daily News podcast.   Today, I'll be speaking with Dr. Robert Carlson, the chief executive officer of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network or NCCN. Dr. Carlson will be telling us about key advances in cancer care that were featured at the 2022 NCCN Annual Conference.   Our full disclosures are available in the show notes and disclosures of all guests on the podcast can be found on our transcripts at asco.org/podcasts.   Bob, I'm really pleased to have you on the podcast today, and personally very excited to serve in my new role as chair of the NCCN Board of Directors.   Dr. Robert Carlson: John, it's a pleasure to be with you this morning and all of us at NCCN look forward to working with you as chair of the NCCN Board of Directors.   Dr. John Sweetenham: Thank you! Bob, there was such a wide breadth of topics that were covered at the NCCN Annual Conference this year. Could you tell us about some of the key abstracts that you think will advance care for patients?   Dr. Robert Carlson: I’d be happy to! We had over 1,000 participants from 40 countries at this year's Annual Meeting. And there were a number of high-quality abstracts reporting on a spectrum of studies, including NCCN young investigators and a number of other investigators.   Three abstracts that I would like to single out include an abstract entitled, “Real-World Data and Independent Predictors of Clinical Outcomes with CDK Inhibitors in Metastatic Estrogen receptor-positive Breast Cancer Patients” which was presented by Priyanka Reddy and colleagues from Case Western Reserve. They assessed how the real-world experience with the CDK 4/6 inhibitors in hormone receptor-positive metastatic breast cancer compared with a clinical trial experience. They retrospectively identified 269 patients with hormone receptor-positive metastatic breast cancer in the first-line setting and assessed progression-free survival and overall survival in the cohort overall, and also in the subset with bone-only metastatic disease in those who had liver involvement.   In the overall cohort, the results demonstrated progression-free survival of 21 and a half months and overall survival of 57.6 months. In those with the bone-only disease, at 5 years, 84% of patients were alive compared with 42% in those with bone plus other visceral sites of disease.   They performed multivariate cox regression, and bone-only disease was an independent predictor of a favorable outcome with a hazard rate of 0.48 for progression-free survival, and 0.38 for overall survival, both highly statistically significant.   In those patients with liver disease, multivariable regression predicted an unfavorable outcome with a hazard ratio of 2.53 for progression-free survival and 2.24 for overall survival. So, the study found that the real-world experience with the CDK 4/6 inhibitors is very similar to that in clinical trials. And that bone-only disease continues to be a positive predictor of outcome and liver disease an unfavorable predictor of outcome.   Another important abstract was entitled, “Reuterin in the Healthy Gut Microbiome Suppresses Colorectal Cancer Growth through Altered Redox Balance,” and was presented by Joshua Goyert and colleagues from the University of Michigan.   This abstract reported on a series of findings related to alterations in the intestinal microbiome, especially related to reuterin, the metabolite from the lactobacillus reuteri.   The investigators found that the fecal metabolites f