The Best of ASCO meeting: a review

Because of a friend's wedding, I couldn't attend ASCO this year (this is not an infrequent occurrence for me at this time in my life — it seems so inconsiderate to have ASCO right during prime wedding season! ;) ).

In years past, I have used ASCO's virtual meeting, which I like very much. Even if you go to the big ASCO in person, you may miss sessions you want to see because of overlapping meetings, or you may not be able to retain everything that was said at the sessions you did attend. It is nice to be able to watch the presentations again in the comfort of your home or office as well. But the downside is that you need the time to do it, and setting aside that time with the demands of patient care and research and grant deadlines is no small feat.

So, this year, I decided to check out the ASCO sanctioned Best of ASCO meeting (there were two this year; I attended the one in Atlanta). This was a much more informal event than big ASCO, with a few hundred participants, rather than tens of thousands. The format is the usual didactic — an oncology thought leader discussing four or so abstracts, each centered around a particular disease area (except survivorship). Each abstract is given about 15 minutes, and the slides used for presentation at ASCO are represented here with the discussant generally adding a slide of their conclusions. There is time set aside for questions from the audience (which are usually the same two or three oncologists who love to hear themselves in a mic, apparently. You know who you are.) From what I could tell, the faculty generally stay through the breaks, if not the whole day, inviting time to meet with them, should you desire. The hotel is usually a nice, business-oriented hotel. Breakfast and lunch are included.

The quality of the slides was, in general, excellent with most discussants attempting to provide a general overview of the prior research to calibrate learners to the "state of the science." This is a meeting geared strongly toward community oncology practitioners. Certainly, the Best of ASCO is more expensive than the Virtual Meeting, when you incorporate flight, hotel and the cost of entry to the meeting. It is also not very comprehensive, pulling out only the most practice-changing abstracts in general. Lastly, I think the endless droning lectures in PowerPoint are a really ineffective and passive learning style (for me), though you would be hard pressed to find anything else out there. So, some good, some bad, but all in all, a nice meeting.