Rana McKay: It's great to be here with you today. My name is Rana McKay and I'm a GU medical oncologist at the University of California in San Diego. And we're really excited to launch the preview for the European IKCS meeting that's going to be happening in just a couple of weeks. The meeting will launch April 22nd through the 24th in Antwerpen, Belgium, and we're excited to be here today. Sarah, do you want to introduce yourself and take us through the program?

Samra Turajlic: Thanks very much, Rana. Hello everyone. I'm Samra Turajlic, I'm a medical oncologist at the Royal Marsden in London and a clinician scientist at the Francis Creek Institute. And I've been honored to be part of the scientific committee that's put the program together. And we are extremely excited to be meeting face to face this time because last year's event was online. And the event before that in 2020 was canceled as you know. So there's a huge amount of energy that will be brought to this meeting, which will cover everything from basic science to translational science to changes in clinical practice and critically patient oriented sessions as well. Just to confirm that dates of the meeting, it will run from Friday the 22nd of April through to Sunday the 24th of April. And it will take place in Antwerpen in Belgium, which is a great place to visit.

So very much hope to see you there. As I said, it's a very comprehensive meeting and I just want to tell you in a little bit more detail about what we'll be covering. And actually we are really well served this year by all the developments that have happened in many aspects of kidney cancer management and understanding. So therefore we'll have a session on the new W-H-O classification of kidney cancer. We'll have talks on adjuvant therapy, fresh off the press on the approval of adjuvant pembrolizumab for kidney cancer. And of course, we'll be talking about the neo-adjuvant window as well. In terms of the keynote lecture, I'm delighted that this year we're going to have Tim O'Brien from Guy's and St. Thomas' in London. Tim has just stepping down as the president of BAUS, the British Association of Urological Surgeons.

And he will be reflecting on challenges in the surgical management of both locally advanced and recurrent disease. And I promise this is going to be a very exciting session. Tim is a very dynamic and interactive speaker. We really wanted to have a holistic program this year, and therefore we've included a session on caring for the whole patient where we will discuss misinformation, cost of kidney cancer care, psychosocial implications of cancer, and so on.

We are fortunate today that the choice of systemic therapies for the treatment of kidney cancer are seemingly endless, but that also leaves us with a challenge of choice of treatment both in the first and second line. And we'll have sessions on systemic therapy for metastatic disease in both first and second line with very fiery debates in favor and against different approaches.

And then not forgetting what's upstream of metastatic disease and adjuvant therapy, which is really diagnostics and screening. And to this respect, have a whole session that's dedicated both to genetics and radiological approaches to screening and also management of incidental renal masses, which is an increasing issue for all of us.

The program is comprehensive and therefore we'll go right to the other end of the spectrum, which is basic science and kidney cancer. And we're honored to have some of the key research scientists in this area to look at both gene centric understanding of kidney cancer and increasingly important understanding of the tumor microenvironment. And what we hope to do from this basic science session is to go into the relevance of these data to biomarkers. How can this help us to stratify our patients for surveillance and treatment options and within the biomarker session we're aiming to be really aspirational. We're looking at TCR sequencing, single cell RNA sequencing. We're thinking about future treatments, vaccine, and cellular therapies and overcoming resistance to the therapies that we have at the moment.

We have a session on the role of radiation therapy in the management of kidney cancer, both in terms of treatment of brain metastases, treatment of polygon metastases, and combination of radiation with systemic therapy. As ever, we will have our wood fire session with several case presentations and discussions. And this is of course, one of our most popular formats. So look forward to seeing you come along to that and contribute.

We are not overlooking the less common subtypes of kidney cancer. So we are going to have an entire session that will assess translocation, chromophobe, collecting duct, renal medullary, and papillary renal cell carcinoma. We are in a place now where we want to understand about treatment deescalation as well for our patients. So intermittent therapy or reduced doses and we're going to address both these questions relative to the very recent data. One more we've been served very well by all the developments in kidney cancer over the last 12 months. And we want to reflect the majority of those data in this meeting. So over to you, Rana.

Rana McKay: Wonderful. And it was such a wonderful, comprehensive overview to really hit clinical application, translational science and research questions that are still pending in the field of renal cell carcinoma. So what I'd love to do is actually take us through some of the abstracts that have gotten accepted and are going to be presented. We have the top line abstract titles with the presenters, and also the first, second, and third place award winners for the abstracts. So we'll go through some of those. First I'll highlight our first place award winner is to speak about looking at the patient as a whole, looking at the relevance of items in the fact kidney cancer symptom inventory 19, the [fisckie 00:07:16] 19 results of patient survey. So [Christian Berkro 00:07:22] who's really developed a specialty in understanding patient reported outcomes will be presenting on that. That's abstract, too.

There'll be another abstract that'll be looking at the systematic review of heterogeneity and outcomes for reporting the definition and measurement in localized disease. And this is becoming ever so increasingly important in the context of localized and adjuvant therapy trials that are being rolled out. That's the second place abstract award winner.

And the third place abstract award winner is looking at real world impact of immune checkpoint inhibitors on survival in patients with metastatic RCC. And we've obviously recently seen a plethora of clinical trials of IO combination therapy in the frontline space. And we know that our clinical trial populations are very different than real world practice. So really looking at the application there.

There's going to be a series of other abstracts, we're not going to go through all of them, but just to wet your appetite, Dr. [Bernard Espudie 00:08:29] will be presenting on the discontinuation arm from CheckMate 9ER. CheckMate 9ER initially had a arm of NIVO IPI CAVO, and that arm was discontinued, and we hope to get a preview on outcomes and what has happened for patients from that arm.

Other abstracts that I would like to highlight, obviously COVID-19 has had a dramatic impact in our cancer care delivery and outcomes for patients. There will be a couple of abstracts focusing on the perceptions of COVID-19 vaccination among patients with renal cell carcinoma and also waning COVID-19 vaccinations for patients with renal cell carcinoma. That certainly has implications for the way that we deliver care.

Another important item is really looking at biomarkers and biomarkers of response and resistance and love to highlight this abstract from the City of Hope Group that'll be coming through looking at ultrasensitive circulating tumor DNA assays being able to distinguish partial and complete responders with immunotherapy and metastatic RCC. So I think it'll be really exciting to hear what is going to be shared around that topic.

There's also going to be a series of abstracts that include both localized therapy and radiotherapy options, an abstract that'll be looking at laparoscopic radical nephrectomy, the safety and visibility of this approach, a case report. So it'll be exciting to see that data be presented for our surgical colleagues who'll be attending the meeting. And as I stated as well, there will also be a radiosurgery abstract that'll be presented, looking at image guided robotic radiosurgery for the treatment of patients with metastatic RCC.

There will be a couple of trials in progress that will be presented. We will highlight the Light Spark 011 study of belzutifan plus labatinine versus cabozantinib. Large phase three study that's currently ongoing. There's also another clinical trial called the, I don't think it actually has a name in the abstract title but it's a three arm randomized multicenter phase two trial comparing patient reported outcomes actually, and monitoring patients who are on cabozantinib. So it'll be interesting to see that looking at use of ePRO versus paper pro versus just usual care for helping track patient reported outcomes. So it'll be really interesting as we deploy these quality of life measures in the context of clinical practice and clinical care, which modality is actually seems to be more effective.

So that's just wet your appetite a little bit about the abstract program for the meeting. Super exciting to have really a wide breadth of abstracts that cover the multidisciplinary care for patients with kidney cancer. At the meeting, we're also going to be presenting two awards, and I'll be honored to present the first awardee lecture the [Peter Der Moldar 00:11:42] award and lecture in oncology will be given by Dr. Laurence Albiges from the Institute of Gustave Roussey. She is the department head for the Department of a Medical Oncology at Gustave Roussey has really been a champion figurehead in really defining the new treatment paradigm for patients with RCC. Involved in several landmark clinical trials, the design and development of those. So we will be really excited to hear what she has to say about RCC and really her journey in this space. And Samra, do you want to highlight the second award winner?

Samra Turajlic: Yes. The second award winner of the John Fitzpatrick lecture is Grant Stewart from UK. He's a professor of surgical oncology and a consultant geological surgeon at the University of Cambridge. And Grant's contribution to the field has really been in surgical trials. He's been a champion of those, but also setting up frameworks for biosampling and translational research. And of course, having surgeons as key stakeholders in that is critically important. In his lecture, he will be focusing on the management of early stage kidney cancer, which is really something that he's focused on his research over the last decade. So we very much look forward to hearing from Grant.

Rana McKay: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today just to hear a little bit about the preview for the IKCS meeting, we're super excited about it. We hope to see you there, just a couple of weeks away. There will be a virtual option and obviously also a live option and look forward to connecting in the coming weeks.

Samra Turajlic: See you all in Antwerpen or online.