Fall Group Meeting: A Memorable Swan Song
SWOG’s fall group meeting in Chicago was, as I’ve mentioned before, my last as group chair, and I have to say, it was one of the best. I am so pleased to go out on a high note!
When I was elected SWOG chair in 2012, the group had fewer than 10,000 members, at about 500 member sites. Today we count more than 20,000 members, participating from more than 1,300 clinical sites. In the intervening years, we’ve opened more than 120 clinical trials and reported results of our work via more than 2,000 publications and presentations.
Our Chicago plenary highlighted some of the advances we’ve seen over that time frame in oncology research – both clinical and translational – and in the NCI’s approach to supporting nationwide cancer clinical trials in the public interest.
My opening to the plenary gave me a chance to thank and pay tribute to two of our longest-serving committee leaders – Dr. Siu Fun Wong of our pharmaceutical sciences committee and Dr. Robert Orlowski of our myeloma committee – and to welcome their successors (I’ll introduce both in upcoming Front Lines). I also had a chance to thank five of our patient advocates who are approaching the ends of their second terms (term limits eventually come for us all).
In other sessions in Chicago, we heard insights from National Cancer Institute program officers reassuring us that, in a time of significant change within the U.S. biomedical research enterprise, the NCI’s pursuit of its mission continues unabated.
The SWOG Leadership Council on Representation’s open forum featured a keynote talk by Dr. Carolyn Reyes-Guzman from the NCI’s Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, who presented on strategies for aligning communications and research proposals with emerging National Institutes of Health priorities.
She highlighted the need to keep the focus in grant applications on identifying the gap in cancer research the project seeks to address. In research objectives related to special populations, for example, the focus should be on the medical condition, disease burden, outcome, or clinical behavior being studied.
Dr. Brandy Heckman-Stoddard, chief (until recently acting, but now, permanent) of Community Oncology and Prevention Trials in the NCI’s Division of Cancer Prevention, was also with us in Chicago sharing her insights in several sessions, including details on the status of the upcoming NCORP Research Base Notice of Funding Opportunity.
In some of the same sessions in Chicago, Dr. Raymond Osarogiagbon – SWOG’s new executive officer for community engagement – spoke about approaches to engaging new community clinical sites in our trials, particularly sites in rural areas, a strategic priority for SWOG during the coming grant cycle. Bringing clinical research to more patients in rural locations was also the focus of our Take Action Symposium.
We held kickoffs for two new GU committee trials – our S2427 BRIGHT trial testing whether radioimmunotherapy in patients whose muscle-invasive bladder cancer has a complete response to neoadjuvant therapy can allow these patients to keep their bladder, and our CCTG-PR.26 Triple Switch joint trial with the Canadian Cancer Trials Group in patients with metastatic castration-sensitive prostate cancer. If you missed them, both sessions were recorded and will be available soon to SWOG members behind password on swog.org.
Our Geriatric Assessment Hands-On Workshop was a great success, providing tools and practice in conducting geriatric assessments in oncology trials. The workshop was a follow-up to the highly successful Geriatric Oncology Symposium conducted at our spring meeting and should help us increase our enrollment of older patients.
The mood at our SWOG Clinical Trials Partnerships (CTP) update forum was quite upbeat, as our CTP team celebrated the activation of its second trial, the 21CTP.HN01 CAPT-HN trial in head and neck cancer. Co-PIs for this study, for 21CTP.LEUK01 (CTP’s first activated trial), and for the 21CTP.BREAST01 MONITOR trial now in development all presented information on their studies. You can learn more by checking out the update forum recording soon to be on the SWOG website and linked from swogctp.org.
In our Saturday morning committee chairs session, we had a fruitful discussion of how our committees can be even more strategic in building broad clinical trial portfolios, balancing factors such as the need to answer important questions in rare cancers with the need to incorporate what we’ve learned from trials such as Pragmatica-Lung in offering streamlined, pragmatic studies that are easier for our sites to open and enroll to
I remain SWOG chair until the start of our next NCTN grant cycle on March 1 of 2026, but as a follow-on to my swan song plenary, I’ll say it here (and likely repeat it later): thank you for the opportunity to lead and to serve in this role.
Recordings of open sessions from Chicago will be available soon to SWOG members on swog.org.
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