The Spring and early Summer medical conference season has wrapped up!  As in other recent years, lung cancer has figured prominently at oncology meetings, including those focused on basic science, medical oncology, radiation oncology, and surgery.  Such meetings include the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), the American College of Radiology (ACR), The American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS), the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), and the Targeted Therapies and Small Cell Lung Cancer meetings sponsored by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC).  Findings from these meetings were tweeted with the following hashtags and twitter handles:

#AACR2019 (@AACR)

#AATS2019 (@AATSHQ)

#ASCO19 (@ASCO)

#ACR2019 (@RadiologyACR)

@IASLC

#LCSM

Not surprisingly, immunotherapy was in the spotlight at many of the meetings with a focus on optimal combinations and patient selection, on long term outcomes, and on utilization of therapeutic drugs in earlier stage disease and in small cell lung cancer. On the targeted therapy side, there has been a renewed push to identify mechanisms of resistance to approved drugs, to find new targets, and to identify new agents for these targets or for those patients who have failed previous therapy. And finally, with regard to early stage lung cancer, there remains a continued focus on early detection, on improving lung cancer screening uptake, on correlation of imaging features with biology, and on focused local therapy, whether by surgical resection or with stereotactic  radiation.

Through social media, now more than ever before, the presentations at these meetings get widely and rapidly disseminated to scientists, physicians, and patients and advocates. In particular, the lung cancer community has made a tremendous effort to engage patients and advocates at many of these meetings to get their input and feedback on what is important to them. In this #LCSM Chat, the @lcsmchat team will summarize what is new in lung cancer and describe the topics that were in focus at these national meetings. We will highlight some of the major lung cancer presentations from the meetings, but also describe the overall direction of each organization with regard to lung cancer. It is an incredible time for lung cancer patients, with better diagnostic pathways and more treatment options than ever before.  Yet lung cancer remains the most common cancer killer by far.  Obviously, we need to keep pushing, with better science, more clinical trials, and more patient education and engagement. Medical conferences are critical to accomplish that mission. With that in mind, we will address the following topics during this week’s #LCSM Chat:

T1.  How have the meetings changed over time and what is the best way for patients/advocates to understand what is important?

T2.  What were the major findings regarding immunotherapy that were presented at the meetings?

T3.  What was presented at the meetings with regard to overcoming resistance to targeted therapy?

T4.  Has there been progress in finding new therapeutic targets and in bringing new drugs to the clinic?

T5.  What is happening with regard to screening, early diagnosis, and treatment of early stage lung cancer?

Join moderator, Brendon Stiles, MD, as we explore this topic. Please remember to include #LCSM in ALL your tweets so the other chat participants can see them. If you need a refresher, read our primer on participating in the chat. Note that some tweetchat apps (like tchat.io) will not display tweets longer than 140 characters.