NCI Convenes Workshop on Issues in Post-Treatment Surveillance

NCI held a workshop entitled, “Issues in Post-Treatment Surveillance” on March 26-27, 2018 (agenda). The workshop was co-chaired by Drs. Lalitha Shankar and Jeff Abrams, DCTD and Dr. Barry Kramer, Division of Cancer Prevention. Plenary lectures focused on imaging, liquid biopsy, and the patient perspective in post-treatment surveillance. A video of the meeting can be seen on NIH Videocast (Day 1 and Day 2).

The workshop attendees, including NIH staff, members of academia and industry, and patient advocates were asked to:

• Consider post treatment surveillance in oncology, and how the management algorithm(s) changes with time, clinical evidence, and technological advances
• Discuss issues in post-treatment surveillance given the current advances in imaging and liquid biopsies
• Identify and prioritize histologies and tools that are most suitable to be evaluated in clinical trials in NCI’s National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN) or NCI’s Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP), or potentially in clinical registries
• Make recommendations for future clinical trials in non-small cell lung, breast, prostate, colon, and testicular cancer

Workshop discussions included the following:

• Within disease types:
  • What level of operating characteristics are needed for surveillance of low vs. high risk disease?
  • Which of the novel diagnostic tools are ready for multicenter evaluations?
  • What are the endpoints for these studies?
• Patient perspectives and choice for frequency of diagnostic testing
• The field is at interface of three areas – therapy, prevention, and community physicians and health services research issues