“So what did you learn at the meeting? Is there something new for me?” Sometime during my first clinic session after the ASCO Annual Meeting, I inevitably get asked these questions by patients. It’s gotten so common that I expect the questions and prepare an answer. Usually, I’m asked these questions by patients with the most advanced cancers. So what do I want to say? I want to say: “I saw some pretty amazing preliminary data on drugs that aren’t ready for prime time, yet”; or, “There’s jaw-dropping work being done with decision-support tools in cancer”; or, “There was this inspiring study on screening for cervical cancer in India. . . .”

But that’s not what patients want to hear. There’s often an expectation that at national meetings—along with abstracts—vials of new, blockbuster drugs are handed out like shampoo samples. We pack them in our bags and rush home to infuse them into patients. I wish that was the case. Instead, we hear updates on combinations promising in phase II, but not so promising in phase III. We hear partial data on encouraging interventions, but wait months for full publication and even longer for regulatory approval. Realistically, what we bring home from meetings is not a vial of “cureximab,” but a hopeful wait-and-see attitude.

But that’s not so helpful for our patients anticipating the next best therapy, waiting for a spot in an early-phase clinical trial. They need something much sooner, and rarely do data-packed meetings provide an immediate answer for them. In occasional instances, meetings can have a fairly rapid impact on practice, where new drugs are disseminated into practice before publication in high-impact journals. But on the other hand, practice-changing data presented at meetings can lie suspended in abstract form for years before being published—or, worse, can never be published at all. The pace of cancer drug development has quickened, at least in isolated cases, but it must go faster. A path to faster drug discovery and development depends on: better funding of biomedical research; development of stronger industry/academic/community partnerships for development; improving the evaluation process; streamlining post-approval monitoring; and more. Work needs to be done to ensure meeting abstracts see the light of day in publications—whether findings were positive or negative. We owe it to the patients who participated in the studies and the patients expecting results.

Returning home from the ASCO Annual Meeting, I’m rejuvenated by new collaborations, stimulating research questions, and exciting data. I can predict how cancer treatment a year from now will be different from cancer treatment today. But how do I relate this trend to patients who need more treatment options now? A patient who had just participated in a phase I trial asked me, “So, anything new for me at the oncology meeting this year?” I responded, “There are some very exciting treatments around the corner. We are making progress everyday, and by participating in a trial, you have contributed to that process.” I wish I had a better answer. How do you answer this question?