Message from the Chair continued our delegates, not only for the warm glow that the positive comments always bring, but to make sure that we are meeting our delegates’ needs and hearing their thoughts on how the meeting could be improved. This year’s ASM also incorporated the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia’s annual Prostate Cancer Specialist Nursing Service conference. This was part of the recent agreement signed between ANZUP and PCFA whereby both organisations would participate in fundraising to support ANZUP prostate cancer clinical trials. It was great to have a part of the program dedicated to prostate specialist nurses and of course to have their involvement in the wider ASM as well. The 2017 ASM will be held in Melbourne and we are very fortunate to have Carmel Pezaro as our convenor. More news will follow soon but you can already pencil in the dates: 16-18 July 2017. The ANZUP company Annual General Meeting was held on 11 July 2016 and it was a great pleasure to show how ANZUP is ploughing more and more of its resources back into clinical trials and development opportunities. The Board has worked very hard on refreshing our Strategic Plan, now available on our website. Behind the high level strategic plan is a detailed operational plan listing specific goals, actions, timelines and deliverables. The Board, our CEO Marg McJannett and our hardworking secretariat now all have the task of making these goals a reality. Some of them are quite aspirational but we have learned from our experience with ANZUP that what seemed unlikely a few years ago quite quickly becomes reality.
Clincal Trials ANZUP’s clinical trials program continues to accelerate in both depth and breadth. We have clinical trials active across all of our disease types and involving the various disciplines we represent. Not all of our clinical trials are the conventional “test a drug” ones; we also have studies involving surgery, radiotherapy, nursing and allied health input, psycho-oncology, supportive care, health economics and research translational questions. You can read more about all of this on our website and of course the ANZUP ClinTrials Refer app is available for anyone to download and use to find out details of each trial. We are excited to be expanding our presence yet further, with involvement of the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) and some additional US sites for our ENZARAD trial, and linking with the US
National Cancer Institute and the Alliance group for the forthcoming TIGER testicular cancer trial. Not only will these new strategic links help us in our current trials, but importantly they represent the advent of a new global cooperative intergroup structure that will be a unique vehicle for performing large scale international trials in the future. ASM CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT SESSION
Concept Development Workshops There has been a considerable amount of ANZUP activity outside the direct trials arena as well. We have already held two Concept Development Workshops in May (germ cell and prostate) and another workshop at the ASM. The bladder and renal CDWs will be held in August. A key outcome of the prostate CDW was to refine and shortlist proposals for funding through the joint ANZUP/PCFA mechanism mentioned above. A SAC subcommittee met in June to review and rank the proposals. We are delighted to announce that the first trial supported through this initiative will be insert details led by Dr Michael Hoffman. We are now deep into the process of developing the full trial documentation and setting up all the systems necessary to open this trial as soon as possible. Watch this space! We look forward to more concepts coming through this and other mechanisms for funding support, but it is particularly gratifying to see that ANZUP is now in the position to help support this research directly instead of depending on the unreliable prospects of competitive grant funding. Our aim is to continue to improve this capability and capacity into the future.
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