Dr Sandip Patel Previews the Highly Anticipated 50th Anniversary of WCLC

The upcoming 2024 World Conference on Lung Cancer (WCLC), held in San Diego, California, will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC).

Ahead of this year’s meeting, Sandip Patel, MD, medical oncologist and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, joined The American Journal of Managed Care^® to discuss the exciting features, presentations, and products of international collaboration offered by WCLC 2024.

The 50th anniversary celebration will feature unique festivities in honor of the organization's long-standing history, themed “Through the Decades,” that will take place in San Diego’s famous Gaslamp Quarter on September 8. Attendees can look forward to an evening enjoying local cuisine, dancing, decade-honoring dress, and more.

What would you say are the goals of this year’s WCLC? How do you foresee this year’s meeting building off of the prior meetings?

The World Conference on Lung Cancer, WCLC, in 2024 is going to be in San Diego. And for the IASLC, the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer, this is really a seminal moment for our organization. It's 50 years of us being in existence, really focused on an international community, focused on the prevention, treatment and care of patients with thoracic malignancies.

As this is the 50th anniversary for our society, we have some special events honoring our history as well as looking into the future for what the priorities are for the organization that treats the most common cancer killer worldwide. I think in particular, what I'm interested in is celebrating 50 years of the organization, as well as some of the scientific presentations, which will be focused on advances in molecular therapy, advances in immunotherapy, and improvements in the screening, detection and supportive care of patients suffering from the thoracic malignancies.

Are there any topics you expect to take center stage at WCLC 2024? Are there any particular sessions you would like to highlight?

The 2 most, I think, unique sessions for this conference, which really relate to the 50th anniversary of the IASLC, include a special plenary that goes through the history of the organization, and then a special celebration that'll occur throughout the Gaslamp District, where folks can really see the organization through each decade.

I think looking at some of the other topics that may be of interest, I think always we're interested in international collaborations, and the first day of the conference has a lot related to collaborations in Asia, collaborations related to screening of lung cancer. I think those are going to be of interest. We also have multiple sessions around the organization, mentoring junior investigators in clinical trials and grants. And so, I really think this is a meeting where there's something for everyone, a global community, as well as a multidisciplinary community that's collectively meeting once a year—at this meeting—in person, ideally, to strategize on how we can best fight lung cancer.

Can you share any details about the conference sessions you are involved in?

A couple of sessions I'm involved in include the presidential plenary as well as some of the keynote addresses by some of our esteemed faculty, which include deputy director of the NCI [National Cancer Institute], Doug Lowy, [MD] the director of Virginia Commonwealth University and one of the pulmonologists who led in lung cancer research for a long period of time, Dr Rob Wynn, as well as the leader of the National Cancer Institute of Mexico, Dr Oscar Marietta. That’s one of the sessions I'm really looking forward to seeing and, additionally, participating in the 50th anniversary festivities, as well as some of the satellite sessions, including allyship for women in thoracic oncology, as well as a variety of other sessions. So, I'm really looking forward to being very busy not only attending and seeing these wonderful sessions, but participating in some capacity as well.

What are some of the bigger takeaways you hope attendees have after the conference concludes?

I think it's the scope of the organization and what we're trying to accomplish globally, increasing clinical trials to be representative of the global population to involve increasing collaboration worldwide. And so, the ability for us to get together and look at the latest data for particular molecular subsets or biomarker directed subgroups, as well as just overall across the multidisciplinary team. Better said, how we can prevent, treat, and mitigate lung cancer risk is something I'm looking forward to. But I think overall, the unique aspect of this meeting for me is the 50th anniversary aspect, where we're going to focus on 50 years of our organization and the history of the organization, but also thinking about what the next 50 years will look like for the IASLC.