MESSAGE FROM THE ANZUP CHAIR Welcome to the final edition for 2020 of UPdate, the newsletter of the Australian & New Zealand Urogenital and Prostate (ANZUP) Cancer Trials Group Ltd. I usually fill this introduction to the newsletter with a description of everything ANZUP has done during the year. We celebrate how we have come together and we look forward to every upcoming opportunity to do it again. We thrive on this. Every year we seem to grow more, and take on more projects, and somehow continue to achieve even greater heights. 2020 has brought some unique challenges and I am proud and amazed by the way the ANZUP team and all of you have risen to them. Let me outline a few. Cancellation of the Melbourne and Sydney Pedalthons and of our ASM could have spelled disaster for us: major reductions in revenue and profile, and more importantly the possibility of severe limitations in what we might be able to do to support our trials, our protocol development pathways, and our education and training initiatives. Instead, we have seen the amazing generosity of our sponsors and supporters: almost none of them asked for the funds to be returned, but instead looked for even more ways to support us. Then the #YourWay campaign came seemingly out of nowhere to help us raise our profile and that of the diseases we work in and the trials we do, with amazing results you will read about in this newsletter. The ASM has been reinvented as our first virtual “mini-ASM,” which took place on 29-30 November and was a resounding success. It will never replace the sheer joy of getting together with all of you, but it is remarkable just what can be achieved by our fantastic team and by you, our members and contributors. Thank you all so much, and especially our great team headed by Marg McJannett!
these meetings productively by virtual means. This has resulted in a continuing pipeline of ideas and creativity, and perhaps new ways of working together. This year we had CDWs for our Translational committee and our Quality of Life and Supportive Care committee. There are positives here that we will continue to use even after COVID-19. We had planned early in the year to bring together senior clinicians from around the Asia Pacific region to recapitulate our 2018 meeting where we discussed the local and regional implications of the Advanced Prostate Cancer Consensus Conference. That was to take place in Singapore, which now might as well be on the moon for all our chance of getting there. No problem, sez the ANZUP team, and a virtual meeting involving people living across 140 degrees of longitude was designed and executed flawlessly. Watch for a paper coming out of that soon. Some things just could not happen. Our TheraP trial was slated for an oral presentation at ASCO, which would have been yet another feather in our cap and a demonstration once again of just how far ANZUP has come on the world stage. ASCO was very different this year but it did not stop the TheraP data from being presented, noticed by many, and discussed by a large number of people. The momentum from that trial will continue as we move ahead with new projects in that space. However, not even a pandemic could stop us doing the trials that needed to be done. People around the world watched in amazement as we moved ahead with the
We usually meet on several occasions for face to face Concept Development Workshops. That wasn’t going to happen in a year when for some of us it was not possible to go past the end of your driveway. Once again, the team came through: we worked out ways of having
IAN DAVIS
3 | ANZUP UPdate Summer 2020
