ASCO 2026

I’m joined by Doctor. Carlos Barrias, Professor of Internal Medicine Department and Director of Oncology Research Unit at Sao Luco in Brazil. Welcome. Yes, I’m Director of the Latin American Cooperative Oncology Group. Pleasure being here. Fantastic. So I think we’ve obviously seen a lot of innovation happening here at ASCO. ASCO. One of the things that we’re seeing is important advances in cancer science and care and the significant gap that still remains between these innovations and actually access and reaching patients. I think that progressively everybody is starting to realize that that’s a significant problem. Okay? If we look at what happens with new drugs and new technologies in terms of treatment, I think that, we all are seeing that not more than ten to fifteen percent of patients that need these drugs in the whole world are actually having access. So we need to recognize this as a problem and then start working on it. And in your opinion, what do you think are some of those barriers you talk about? Well, the discrepancies are not just in drug access. What may work in the US or Western Europe is not gonna work in the Middle East or Latin America or East Asia. So I think that the the participation of local experts within a framework, okay, that is actually genuinely and honestly willing to solve the problem, I think that that’s what it’s going to take. And, obviously, we’re here at ASCO that there’s thousands of your esteemed colleagues all coming together to hear about the latest scientific breakthroughs. Know, what have you heard or what have you seen that gives you optimism that the sort of future of cancer care is changing in a way that’s going to really see the benefit translate through to patients. We are in a process of identifying and learning about the biology of the disease in a way that is accelerating every year. Not all patients are the same. Not all tumors are the same. And understanding these differences is paramount. The critical aspect that I think is becoming more and more frequent, and I think that’s going to be revolutionary, is the introduction of artificial intelligence. Yeah. That was gonna be my question. AI is going to actually help us. And that’s only one of the possible contributions AI will have to this process. It will help drug development. It would be in the health, patient selection. It will help a number of different aspects of what we do. So I think that the the outlook for me is very positive. So my final question to you, if we were stood here ten years ten years time, what would you say, success would look like if you say, you know, we’ve done our job well, we’ve kind of closed that gap, we’ve got the innovations to patients? So if you look at what’s happening with breast cancer, which is my particular area today, you see that over the last forty years, the mortality from breast cancer has decreased in about sixty percent in the US. That’s not happening all over the world. So I think that in ten years, would be fantastically happy and very, very satisfied if we’re able to deliver the required basic treatment to all patients. If we’re able to do that, we’re going to start decreasing the mortality from breast cancer and that’s probably true for other tumor types as well. Amazing. Well, you so much for speaking with us today. Thank you very much.

So joining me today is Professor Hope Rugo, Division Chief of Breast Medical Oncology and Professor of Medical Oncology and Therapeutics Research at City of Hope. Hi professor Rugo. Lovely to meet you. Hi. Nice to see you. Thanks for having me. So we’ve been asking, oncology experts, at the meeting how we can ensure that scientific breakthroughs translate into meaningful improvements in patient outcomes globally. We’re in a time of very rapid change. And that’s actually fascinating. We can do big data now. We can use a, computers to try and understand how we could use either gene expression, profiles or maybe combine, you know, gene mutations and gene expression and proteomics to really design something where you could understand the better treatment for each tumor type. I think that, you know, what we need to do is plan our studies so that we’re getting the biomarker results. You know, we have rich translational studies that can then go back and inform us about the optimal way to treat our patients. This is gonna really improve outcome. Yeah. I mean it sounds fascinating and I think one of the questions I have for you is when you talk about the clinical trial design, know, how can we, see sort of better collaboration across health care much quicker? You know clinical trials give the drugs to patients, give the opportunity to the patients. So the clinical trials are pretty clear in that part. That doing the translational work, the biomarker data is what’s complicated and a lot of times, for example, a trial will be funded as an investigator initiated trial or a collaborative trial as the entire trial but without biomarkers. And the idea is then you apply for separate funding for the biomarkers. So they’ve always been sort of on the back burner of what’s important in a clinical trial. And I do think we need to change that. My last question to you, I think if you think about health care system improvement over the next decades, what success, you know, do we ultimately need to look like for patients to sort of start to see this improvement kind of coming through in cancer care more, you know, from a global setting? In the next decade, you know, how are we bringing this to patients? I think we’re already bringing it to patients, and we’re on the verge of being able to use ctDNA as a biomarker for early response and potentially improving outcome by changing therapy. We don’t know yet. Yeah. And, you know, looking in the early stage setting at this sort of molecular evidence of residual disease using ctDNA, as the test continues to become more sensitive and hopefully cheaper because I think the expense is gonna be a big issue worldwide, Using the continuum to intervene early, that would be interesting, understanding those who are positive at the start. If they don’t clear, we need better treatment options for those patients. And then we could interrogate the ctDNA and the tumor to try and better understand potentially a target that would be, result in better outcome and potentially prevent recurrence. There are a whole bunch of new antibody drug conjugates, for example, that are being studied. Could we use this sort of sequencing approach to improve outcome? And these are really exciting areas in the future. Wow. It’s so fascinating. So thank you, professor. It’s a pleasure to talk to you, and thanks for being in conversation with real chemistry today. Thanks for listening.

Hi there. I’m delighted to be joined today by professor Tony Mok. And, professor Mok, we’re here today at ASCO in Chicago, but we’d love to talk to you about what’s happening in Asia right now. China had actually, developed significantly in the past two decades, starting with the iPass study that, actually, the infrastructure was limited, with a lot of the hospital. But over the year, now they’ve a fabulous clinical trial facility. But on the top of that, they’ve got a number of novel drug development and also there are sufficient infrastructure to facilitate the drug development. This actually had helped to prove and then develop a number of novel molecules and that’s exactly what we’re seeing in the ESCO and ESMO in the past few years. What further infrastructure changes are needed and how do we ensure that guideline adoption is faster and more patients have access as well? In drug development, each step can be very expensive if you are a start up. But now we have companies that basically they can help you to develop a molecule at the cost that you need. Not cheap, but at least much lower than what you need to do as a development own facility. The next step is to go through all the pre clinicals. But if you want to hire the whole team to do preclinical, run a red lab, it’s going to be very costly. But now they got company who are specialized in that in a very efficient way. And then based on all this data, then you can file your IND and fundraise and then continue your clinical trial. Tell us about the education that’s happening in Asia right now, and how will we take these advancements back from ASCO throughout the Asian regions? In all these major international meeting, you have no idea. The moment it is actually available on stage, it is on Twitter and in China, WeChat. So all those things will appear. Social media take it off. What are patients coming to you with at the moment in terms of the speed of AI? You know patients used to come with newspaper clippings. Now they’re coming with documentation from AI. Tell us a little bit about that and how you’re managing them. I’m glad the patient will that come with information because it means that they have done their research. But of course that in the research process they go into many different directions. However, approach is very simple. I will give them a logical explanation of where they are and what are the current standard of care. Finally, what do you think is next in the, way of innovations coming through Asia? The way I see it over the past three decade is always a collaboration. Something that may start off in China as a concept conceptual drug, but eventually for it to benefit the world, it require international collaboration. Professor Mock, thank you so much for your time today. We’ve really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you.

Hi. I’m with you today with professor Sunil Bhadvi. What have been some of the innovations this year? ASCO is such a phenomenal meeting. This year we have some major advances, some in rare tumors, some in not so rare tumors, and then of course in breast cancer. Let’s talk a little bit about earlier detection. We know that survival outcomes are improved the earlier that we diagnose patients. And I’m just wondering whether anything has changed for you in the last year and if AI is improving any aspects of your workflows in detection. Definitely lung cancer, the the AI tools that are being developed are making a dramatic difference in early detection rates. Those tools are now being applied to mammographic screening, and so we expect an improvement. But what has also changed is the application of AI to routine histology. Now we can predict not only early recurrences, but also late recurrences using a relatively cheap tool. So there there are phenomenal improvements that are occurring every day. Can we talk a little bit about global access to biomarker testing and what you think the future holds so that we have that equity of access throughout the world to reach more patients? If we can develop a hundred dollar test or a fifty dollar test that can be used all across the world using standard HNEs, that is going to be a phenomenal change, in global equity. Yeah. So those kind of tools, which anybody can develop in any part of the world with some competial computational skills and foundation models that are now open source, that would be a huge game changer. We obviously have the privilege of being at ASCO today. How do we take all of this education and, you know, help support other pathologists, other physicians throughout the world so that they keep on top of the data the latest advances? ASCO and the US cap, which is the pathology conferences, those are broadcast. So you no longer need to be traveling all the way from where whichever part of the world that you live. That provides access to people, in all parts of the world so that they can look at, data that has been presented in real time. Forums such as yourselves, which are spreading the information are also important. Podcasts are important. Instagrams are important. LinkedIn is important. All of these things are important. We’re talking really positively about all these aspects in the future, but is there anything standing in our way? There’s always limitations. Right? Everybody who is developing any tool wants to make a profit out of it. So capitalism is going to be a major problem, but it’s also a solution. I hope we can democratize knowledge and use it to improve the care of all patients with cancer. Sunil, will you be here next year? Absolutely. We’re looking forward to interviewing you next year. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you.

So I’m here with Professor Marilyn Bowie, she is a senior member and professor of at Moffitt Cancer Centre. Hi, welcome. Hi. Thanks for talking with us today. I think our big question for you is, you know, how can we ensure that these scientific breakthroughs are really translating into meaningful benefits for patients? There are a lot of scientific breakthroughs, which is great news. However, the real clinical, adoption is another issue. So there’s a big task right in front of us, all medical community, is to connect the targeted therapy, making it into the clinic so patient can benefit from it. But the revolution right now is digital pathology and AI. We’re hoping to augment pathologists’ ability to identify biomarkers more accurately, to diagnose the disease more accurately and more effectively, so we can really help with the patient care. How are you finding that that’s sort of changing your clinical practice and also training? The way I look at AI can really do the following things, help us to find the cancer, classify the cancer and also quantify the biomarkers and also provide prognosis and predictive information. What advances that you’re seeing give you the most optimism? I want to emphasize the biggest improvement is actually to augment the way for biomarker testing. So traditionally we’re just eyeballing it and then gave a percentage and then just call it a positive or negative, but it’s no longer working. For example, as breast cancer, that’s number one cancer for women in the world, used to be just HER2 positive, HER2 negative, and then you treat the patient with HER2 positive. However, the spectrum of HER2 is evolving. So HER2 low and the actual low that used to be in the HER2 negative group, that there is no target therapy, but now there is an antibody drug conjugate that works very well to provide hope for this group of patients. With AI, our ability of accurate and efficient diagnosis will really be improved. Obviously, if we’re gonna see health systems really embrace these new changes in order to start to see those benefits of patients, what do you think needs to change, you know, for that sort of global adoption? So there are multiple barrier for that kind of adoption. We have regulatory barriers and the reimbursement barriers and also technology. But there are certain things we can do right now is to educate pathologists to expand our, expertise in learning these biomarker testing, molecular genomic pathology, and the digital pathology and AI to really sharpen our tools and expand our expertise. Professor Biri, thank you so much for talking to us today. Thank you.

Hi there. We’re at ASCO twenty twenty six, and this year, we’ve been interviewing some of the biggest biggest names within oncology care. We’ve been talking to some of the world’s leading oncologists but we also want to talk to some of the world’s leading communication experts and that’s why I’m very excited to be here with Jim today. I’m excited to be here with you too. I was here in nineteen ninety six to launch Taxotere, so it’s thirty years. Tell us about those first ASCO meetings then and what you see and what has changed over the last couple of decades. One thing that hasn’t changed is the urgency. I think the urgency is bigger than ever really because what we’re seeing is this alarming rate of diagnosis younger and younger. One big exciting development we’ve both worked on in the cardiometabolic world is the GLP-1s are taking one of the big risk factors in cancer down which is weight loss of course but hopefully that will begin to help with the whole prevention side of this story. Let’s have a think about precision medicine right now Jim I know that this is something very dear to your heart, you’ve worked on many many targeted therapies, what are you excited about for the future? Well the big one here as you know is very personal to me. My wife died of small bowel cancer and that has been really undruggable for years. There’s just so much excitement and, you know, new new around molecular medicine and what that can do to help us detect earlier, which is really the most critical factor. And then within that, treat more precisely each and every type of cancer. We have a lot of cancers to conquer. And how do you think AI is helping to support that from a drug discovery but then also communications perspective as well to help educate oncologists faster and smarter. Well I’m so glad you mentioned that because you know we of course have always employed a strategy of following the data. AI has a lot of potential and is already helping us move much more rapidly into very specific areas. So many of the cancers are very particular in terms of how they’re treated so I do think AI will help and is already helping detect earlier, treat better and track. Let’s talk about outcomes for patients throughout the world and what do you think in terms of policy, guideline changes, what needs to happen so we can support the maximum number of patients? So what has to happen is that all these organizations need to listen to patients and they need to hear that voice and understand what patients really need and design clinical trials and regulatory processes, etcetera, that help get these medications to patients faster. Realizing that patients in cancer exist all over the world. They’re not just in one country or your country. They’re everywhere. So if we develop products that can treat across the globe, the better. And Jim, finally, thinking about real chemistry for the future, what do you think is next for the organization? Oh my god, there’s so much. We’re going to see, I think, greater reach into a lot of countries and regions where there are really exciting developments. We are leveraging all the new technology. We’re not running away from it. We’re not scared of it. And I think we could see us go from the two thousand five hundred people we are to many more hundreds. There’s nothing more important than great people when you’re working in such an urgent, important, purposeful area as cancer. And I know all of us feel it from our hearts and we do it because we want to make a difference. That’s why we’re growing. Thanks Jim for your time to speak to you and thanks for all you do. Cheers.