Funding, Deals & Partnerships: BIOLOGICS & MEDICAL DEVICES; BioMed e-Series; Medicine and Life Sciences Scientific Journal – http://PharmaceuticalIntelligence.com
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) will hold its Annual Meeting as a Virtual Online Format. Registration is free and open to all, including non members. Please go to
Presentation titles are available through the online meeting planner. The program also includes six virtual poster sessions consisting of brief slide videos. Poster sessions will not be presented live but will be available for viewing on demand. Poster session topics are as follows:
11:45 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Minisymposium: Emerging Signaling Vulnerabilities in Cancer
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11:45 a.m.-1:15 p.m.
Minisymposium: Advances in Cancer Drug Design and Discovery
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2:00 p.m.-4:50 p.m.
Clinical Plenary: Lung Cancer Targeted Therapy
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1:55 p.m.-4:15 p.m.
Clinical Plenary: Breast Cancer Therapy
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1:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m.
Minisymposium: Drugging Undrugged Cancer Targets
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4:50 p.m.-6:05 p.m.
Symposium: New Drugs on the Horizon 1_______________________
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4:50 p.m.-5:50 p.m.
Minisymposium: Therapeutic Modification of the Tumor Microenvironment or Microbiome
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4:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m.
Minisymposium: Advancing Cancer Research Through An International Cancer Registry: AACR Project GENIE Use Cases__________________________
All session times are EDT.
TUESDAY, APRIL 28
Channel 1
Channel 2
Channel 3
9:00 a.m.-101:00 a.m.
Clinical Plenary: COVID-19 and Cancer
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11:00 a.m.-1:35 p.m.
Clinical Plenary: Adoptive Cell Transfer Therapy__________________________
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10:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Symposium: New Drugs on the Horizon 2_________________________
AACR and Dr. Margaret Foti Announce Free Virtual Annual Meeting for April 27, 28 2020 and other Free Resources
Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, PhD
Please see the following email from Dr. Foti and the AACR on VIRTUAL MEETING to be conducted April 27 and 28, 2020.
This is truly a wonderful job by AACR. In a previous posting I had considered the need for moving international scientific meetings to an online format which would make the information available to a wider audience as well as to those who don’t have the opportunity to travel to a meeting site. At @pharma_BI we will curate and live tweet the talks in order to enhance meeting engagement, as part of the usual eConference Proceedings we do.
Again Great Job by the AACR!
Dear Colleagues,
We hope you are staying safe and well and are adjusting to the challenges of the COVID-19 global pandemic. During this crisis, we remain steadfast in supporting our members and our mission.
I am pleased to announce a number of actions that we are taking to disseminate innovative cancer science and medicine to the global cancer research community:
AACR Virtual Annual Meeting 2020: Selected Presentations. We were excited to receive more than 225 clinical trials for presentation at the Annual Meeting. Due to the time-sensitive nature of these trials—many of which are practice-changing—we are making them available to the community at the time of the original April meeting. Therefore, as per our recent announcement, the AACR will host a slate of selected sessions online featuring these cutting-edge data.
This Virtual Annual Meeting will be held on April 27 and 28, 2020, and will include more than 30 oral presentations in several clinical trial plenary sessions along with commentaries from expert discussants, as well as clinical trial poster sessions consisting of short videos providing the authors’ perspectives. The Virtual Meeting will feature a New Drugs on the Horizon session as well as nine minisymposia that will showcase a broad sample of basic and translational science. Topics will include genomics, tumor microenvironment, novel targets, drug discovery, therapeutics, immunotherapy, biomarkers, and cancer prevention. A special minisymposium titled “Advancing Cancer Research Through an International Cancer Registry” will feature use cases of data available through AACR Project GENIE.
This Virtual Meeting will be available free to everyone, although attendees will be asked to register to participate. The session and presentation titles for the Virtual Meeting, as well as a link to the registration site, will be posted to the AACR website by Monday, April 13.
Release of Abstracts. All of the abstracts scheduled for presentation in the Virtual Meeting—and any other clinical trial abstracts that are scheduled for presentation at the rescheduled meeting—will be posted online on Monday, April 27. All other abstracts that have been accepted for presentation at the rescheduled meeting will be posted online on Friday, May 15.
AACR Annual Meeting 2019: Free Webcast Presentations. The complete webcasts of the AACR Annual Meeting are typically made freely available 15 months after the conclusion of the meeting. However, we have made these webcast presentations available free effective immediately, so that you can review the most compelling science from the Annual Meeting 2019 which was held in Atlanta.
Free Access to AACR Journals. To ensure that all members of the cancer research community have access to the information they need during this challenging time, we have opened access to our nine highly esteemed journals effective today through the end of the virtual meeting. Please be sure to visit the AACR journals webpage for journal highlights, and to sign-up for eTOC alerts.
Rescheduled AACR Annual Meeting. We are planning to reschedule the Annual Meeting for late August while at the same time closely monitoring the developments surrounding COVID-19. An official announcement of the rescheduled meeting will be made in the near future.
We hope that these plans will enable you to continue your important work during this global health crisis. Thank you for all you do to accelerate progress against cancer, and thank you for your loyalty to the AACR.
Sincerely,
Margaret Foti, PhD, MD (hc)
Chief Executive Officer
American Association for Cancer Research
For more information on Virtual Meetings please see
Is It Time for the Virtual Scientific Conference?: Coronavirus, Travel Restrictions, Conferences Cancelled
Curator: Stephen J. Williams, PhD.
UPDATED 3/12/2020
To many of us scientists, presenting and attending scientific meetings, especially international scientific conferences, are a crucial tool for disseminating and learning new trends and cutting edge findings occurring in our respective fields. Large international meetings, like cancer focused meetings like AACR (held in the spring time), AAAS and ASCO not only highlight the past years great discoveries but are usually the first place where breakthroughs are made known to the scientific/medical community as well as the public. In addition these conferences allow for scientists to learn some of the newest technologies crucial for their work in vendor exhibitions.
During the coronavirus pandemic, multiple cancellations of business travel, conferences, and even university based study abroad programs are being cancelled and these cancellations are now hitting the 2020 Spring and potentially summer scientific/medical conferences. Indeed one such conference hosted by Amgen in Massachusetts was determined as an event where some attendees tested positive for the virus, and as such, now other attendees are being asked to self quarantine.
Today I received two emails on conference cancellations, one from Experimental Biology in California and another from The Cancer Letter, highlighting other conferences, including National Cancer Coalition Network (NCCN) meetings which had been canceled.
Dear Stephen,
After thoughtful deliberations, the leaders of the Experimental Biology host societies have made the difficult but necessary decision to cancel Experimental Biology (EB) 2020 set to take place April 4–7 in San Diego, California. We know how much EB means to everyone, and we did not make this decision in haste. The health and safety of our members, attendees, their students, our staff, partners and our communities are our top priority.
As we have previously communicated via email, on experimentalbiology.org and elsewhere, EB leadership has been closely monitoring the spread of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease). Based on the latest guidance from public health officials, the travel bans implemented by different institutions and the state of emergency declared in California less than 48 hours ago, it became clear to us that canceling was the right course of action.
We thank you and the entire EB community for understanding the extreme difficulty of this decision and for your commitment to the success of this conference – from the thousands of attendees to the presenters, exhibitors and sponsors who shared their time, expertise, collaboration and leadership. We deeply appreciate your contributions to this community.
What Happens Next?
Everyone who has registered to attend the meeting will receive a full registration refund within the next 45 days. Once your registration cancellation is processed, you will receive confirmation in a separate email. You do not need to contact anyone at EB or your host society to initiate the process. Despite the cancellation of the meeting, we are pleased to tell you that we will publish abstracts in the April 2020 issue of The FASEB Journal as originally planned. Please remember to cancel any personal arrangements you’ve made, such as travel and housing reservations.
We ask for patience as we evaluate our next steps, and we will alert you as additional information becomes available please see our FAQs for details.
NOTE: An earlier version of this story was published March 4 on the web and was updated March 6 to include information about restricted travel for employees of cancer centers, meeting cancellations, potential disruptions to the drug supply chain, and funds allocated by U.S. Congress for combating the coronavirus.
Further updates will be posted as the story develops.
Forecasts of the inevitable spread of coronavirus can be difficult to ignore, especially at a time when many of us are making travel plans for this spring’s big cancer meetings.
The decision was made all the more difficult earlier this week, as cancer centers and at least one biotechnology company—Amgen—implemented travel bans that are expected to last through the end of March and beyond. The Cancer Letter was able to confirm such travel bans at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Meetings are getting cancelled in all fields, including oncology:
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network March 5 postponed its 2020 annual conference of about 1,500 attendees March 19-22 in Orlando, citing precautions against coronavirus.
“The health and safety of our attendees and the patients they take care of is our number one concern,” said Robert W. Carlson, chief executive officer of NCCN. “This was an incredibly difficult and disappointing decision to have to make. However, our conference attendees work to save the lives of immunocompromised people every day. Some of them are cancer survivors themselves, particularly at our patient advocacy pavilion. It’s our responsibility, in an abundance of caution, to safeguard them from any potential exposure to COVID-19.”
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Board of Directors has made the difficult decision, after careful consideration and comprehensive evaluation of currently available information related to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, to terminate the AACR Annual Meeting 2020, originally scheduled for April 24-29 in San Diego, California. A rescheduled meeting is being planned for later this year.
The AACR has been closely monitoring the rapidly increasing domestic and worldwide developments during the last several weeks related to COVID-19. This evidence-based decision was made after a thorough review and discussion of all factors impacting the Annual Meeting, including the U.S. government’s enforcement of restrictions on international travelers to enter the U.S.; the imposition of travel restrictions issued by U.S. government agencies, cancer centers, academic institutions, and pharmaceutical and biotech companies; and the counsel of infectious disease experts. It is clear that all of these elements significantly affect the ability of delegates, speakers, presenters of proffered papers, and exhibitors to participate fully in the Annual Meeting.
The health, safety, and security of all Annual Meeting attendees and the patients and communities they serve are the AACR’s highest priorities. While we believe that the decision to postpone the meeting is absolutely the correct one to safeguard our meeting participants from further potential exposure to the coronavirus, we also understand that this is a disappointing one for our stakeholders. There had been a great deal of excitement about the meeting, which was expected to be the largest ever AACR Annual Meeting, with more than 7,400 proffered papers, a projected total of 24,000 delegates from 80 countries and more than 500 exhibitors. We recognize that the presentation of new data, exchange of information, and opportunities for collaboration offered by the AACR Annual Meeting are highly valued by the entire cancer research community, and we are investigating options for rescheduling the Annual Meeting in the near future.
We thank all of our stakeholders for their patience and support at this time. Additional information regarding hotel reservation cancellations, registration refunds, and meeting logistics is available on the FAQ page on the AACR website. We will announce the dates and location of the rescheduled AACR Annual Meeting 2020 as soon as they are confirmed. Our heartfelt sympathies go out to everyone impacted by this global health crisis.
Is It Time For the Virtual (Real-Time) Conference?
Readers of this Online Access Journalare familiar with our ongoing commitment to open science and believe that forming networks of scientific experts in various fields using a social strategy is pertinent to enhancing the speed, reproducibility and novelty of important future scientific/medical discoveries. Some of these ideas are highlighted in the following articles found on this site:
In addition, we understand the importance of communicating the latest scientific/medical discoveries in an open and rapid format, accessible over the social media platforms. To this effect we have developed a methodology for real time conference coverage
Using these strategies we are able to communicate, in real time, analysis of conference coverage for a multitude of conferences.
Has technology and social media platforms now have enabled our ability to rapidly communicate, in a more open access platform, seminal discoveries and are scientists today amenable to virtual type of meetings including displaying abstracts using a real-time online platform?
Some of the Twitter analytics we have curated from such meetings show that conference attendees are rapidly adopting such social platforms to communicate with their peers and colleagues meeting notes.
Other Twitter analyses of Conferences Covered by LPBI in Real Time have produced a similar conclusion: That conference attendees are very engaged over social media networks to discuss, share, and gain new insights into material presented at these conferences, especially international conferences.
And although attracting international conferences is lucrative to many cities, the loss in revenue to organizations, as well as the loss of intellectual capital is indeed equally as great.
Maybe there is room for such type of conferences in the future, and attending by a vast more audience than currently capable. And perhaps the #openscience movement like @MozillaScience can collaborate with hackathons to produce the platforms for such an online movement of scientific conferences as a Plan B.
Other articles on Real Time Conference Coverage in the Online Open Access Journal Include:
A recent Science article (Who are the science stars of Twitter?; Sept. 19, 2014) reported the top 50 scientists followed on Twitter. However, the article tended to focus on the use of Twitter as a means to develop popularity, a sort of “Science Kardashian” as they coined it. So the writers at Science developed a “Kardashian Index (K-Index) to determine scientists following and popularity on Twitter.
Now as much buzz Kim Kardashian or a Perez Hilton get on social media, their purpose is solely for entertainment and publicity purposes, the Science sort of fell flat in that it focused mainly on the use of Twitter as a metric for either promotional or public outreach purposes. A notable scientist was mentioned in the article, using Twitter feed to gauge the receptiveness of his presentation. In addition, relying on Twitter for effective public discourse of science is problematic as:
Twitter feeds are rapidly updated and older feeds quickly get buried within the “Twittersphere” =LIMITED EXPOSURE TIMEFRAME
Short feeds may not provide the access to appropriate and understandable scientific information (The Science Communication Trap) which is explained in The Art of Communicating Science: traps, tips and tasks for the modern-day scientist. “The challenge of clearly communicating the intended scientific message to the public is not insurmountable but requires an understanding of what works and what does not work.” – from Heidi Roop, G.-Martinez-Mendez and K. Mills
However, as highlighted below, Twitter, and other social media platforms are being used in creative ways to enhance the research, medical, and bio investment collaborative, beyond a simple news-feed. And the power of Twitter can be attributed to two simple features
Ability to organize – through use of the hashtag (#) and handle (@), Twitter assists in the very important task of organizing, indexing, and ANNOTATING content and conversations. A very great article on Why the Hashtag in Probably the Most Powerful Tool on Twitter by Vanessa Doctor explains how hashtags and # search may be as popular as standard web-based browser search. Thorough annotation is crucial for any curation process, which are usually in the form of database tags or keywords. The use of # and @ allows curators to quickly find, index and relate disparate databases to link annotated information together. The discipline of scientific curation requires annotation to assist in the digital preservation, organization, indexing, and access of data and scientific & medical literature. For a description of scientific curation methodologies please see the following links:
Multiple analytic software packages have been made available to analyze information surrounding Twitter feeds, including Twitter feeds from #chat channels one can set up to cover a meeting, product launch etc.. Some of these tools include:
In a paper entitled Twitter Use at a Family Medicine Conference: Analyzing #STFM13 authors Ranit Mishori, MD, Frendan Levy, MD, and Benjamin Donvan analyzed the public tweets from the 2013 Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) conference bearing the meeting-specific hashtag #STFM13. Thirteen percent of conference attendees (181 users) used the #STFM13 to share their thoughts on the meeting (1,818 total tweets) showing a desire for social media interaction at conferences but suggesting growth potential in this area. As we have also seen, the heaviest volume of conference-tweets originated from a small number of Twitter users however most tweets were related to session content.
However, as the authors note, although it is easy to measure common metrics such as number of tweets and retweets, determining quality of engagement from tweets would be important for gauging the value of Twitter-based social-media coverage of medical conferences.
Thea authors compared their results with similar analytics generated by the HealthCare Hashtag Project, a project and database of medically-related hashtag use, coordinated and maintained by the company Symplur. Symplur’s database includes medical and scientific conference Twitter coverage but also Twitter usuage related to patient care. In this case the database was used to compare meeting tweets and hashtag use with the 2012 STFM conference.
These are some of the published journal articles that have employed Symplur (www.symplur.com) data in their research of Twitter usage in medical conferences.
Here, at Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LBPI) we have integrated our web site, Twitter handle (@pharma_BI), and meeting specific hashtags, with a unique methodology, to monitor and measure meeting participant engagement for various international meetings (please see our Press Coverage section of our site for more information). These meetings included the 2nd Annual Sachs Associates Cancer BioInvestment & Partnering Forum and the 14th Annual Sachs Associates Global Forum.
B. Twitter Usage for Patient Care and Engagement
Although the desire of patients to use and interact with their physicians over social media is increasing, along with increasing health-related social media platforms and applications, there are certain obstacles to patient-health provider social media interaction, including lack of regulatory framework as well as database and security issues. Some of the successes and issues of social media and healthcare are discussed in the post Can Mobile Health Apps Improve Oral-Chemotherapy Adherence? The Benefit of Gamification.
Networking opportunities for learning disability nurses.
Abdulla, S., Marsden, D., Wilson, S., & Parker, M. (2013). Networking opportunities for learning disability nurses: Samuel Abdulla and colleagues explain why social media offer professionals new opportunities for information sharing, discussion and peer support. Learning Disability Practice, 16(5), 30-32.
Using Twitter for professional knowledge.
Kraft, M. A. (2013). Using Twitter for professional knowledge. Journal of the European Association for Health Information and Libraries, 9(4), 10.
There have been concerns with using Twitter and social media to monitor for adverse events. For example FDA funded a study where a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School and other academic centers examined more than 60,000 tweets, of which 4,401 were manually categorized as resembling adverse events and compared with the FDA pharmacovigilance databases. Problems associated with such social media strategy were inability to obtain extra, needed information from patients and difficulty in separating the relevant Tweets from irrelevant chatter. The UK has launched a similar program called WEB-RADR to determine if monitoring #drug_reaction could be useful for monitoring adverse events. Many researchers have found the adverse-event related tweets “noisy” due to varied language but had noticed many people do understand some principles of causation including when adverse event subsides after discontinuing the drug.
However Dr. Clark Freifeld, Ph.D., from Boston University and founder of the startup Epidemico, feels his company has the algorithms that can separate out the true adverse events from the junk. According to their web site, their algorithm has high accuracy when compared to the FDA database. Dr. Freifeld admits that Twitter use for pharmacovigilance purposes is probably a starting point for further follow-up, as each patient needs to fill out the four-page forms required for data entry into the FDA database.
Course: Information 290. Analyzing Big Data with Twitter
School of Information
UC Berkeley
Lecture 1: August 23, 2012
Course description:
How to store, process, analyze and make sense of Big Data is of increasing interest and importance to technology companies, a wide range of industries, and academic institutions. In this course, UC Berkeley professors and Twitter engineers will lecture on the most cutting-edge algorithms and software tools for data analytics as applied to Twitter microblog data. Topics will include applied natural language processing algorithms such as sentiment analysis, large scale anomaly detection, real-time search, information diffusion and outbreak detection, trend detection in social streams, recommendation algorithms, and advanced frameworks for distributed computing. Social science perspectives on analyzing social media will also be covered.
This is a hands-on project course in which students are expected to form teams to complete intensive programming and analytics projects using the real-world example of Twitter data and code bases. Engineers from Twitter will help advise student projects, and students will have the option of presenting their final project presentations to an audience of engineers at the headquarters of Twitter in San Francisco (in addition to on campus). Project topics include building on existing infrastructure tools, building Twitter apps, and analyzing Twitter data. Access to data will be provided.
Other posts on this site on USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND TWITTER IN HEALTHCARE and Conference Coverage include:
FREE ACCESS to Scientific Journalswill be the next step. Research to support that by a study carried by Bjork, B. C., and D. Solomon. 2012. Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact. BMC Medicine. 10(1):73+.
“Following step will be to demonstrated that Scientific Websites like http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com have SAME Scientific impact as Open Journals!!
In the Press Release“EdX represents a unique opportunity to improve education on our own campuses through online learning, while simultaneously creating a bold new educational path for millions of learners worldwide,” MIT President Susan Hockfield said.
Harvard President Drew Faust said, “edX gives Harvard and MIT an unprecedented opportunity to dramatically extend our collective reach by conducting groundbreaking research into effective education and by extending online access to quality higher education.”
“Harvard and MIT will use these new technologies and the research they will make possible to lead the direction of online learning in a way that benefits our students, our peers, and people across the nation and the globe,” Faust continued.
Princeton, Stanford, Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania announced that they would offer free Web-based courses through a for-profit company called Coursera that was founded by two Stanford computer science professors. One of those professors, Andrew Ng, taught a free online course in machine learning this past fall with an enrollment of more than 100,000 students.
By comparing two-year impact factors for journals, researchers found that open access and subscription-based journals have about the same scientific impact.
Open access (OA) journals are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as traditional subscription journals, according to a new study. In a study published in BMC Medicine on July 17 (1), researchers surveyed the impact factors, the average number of citations per paper published in a journal during the two preceding years, of OA and traditional subscription journals.
By comparing two-year impact factors for journals from the four countries that publish the most scientific literature, researchers have found that OA journals have about the same scientific impact as their subscription-based counterparts. Source: BMC Medicine.
At first, the study’s authors—Bo-Christer Björk from the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland, and David Solomon from the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University—found that there was a 30% higher average citation rate for subscription journals. But after controlling for journal discipline, location of publisher, and age of publication, their results showed that OA and subscription journals had nearly identical scientific impact.
“The newer open access published within the last 10 years, particularly those journals funded by article processing fees, had basically the same impact as subscription journals within the same category,” said Solomon. “I think that that is the key finding.”
The initial higher citation rate for subscription journals was the result of a higher percentage of older OA journals from countries that are not major publishing countries. “A lot of them are from South America or other developing countries, and they tend to have lower impact factors,” said Solomon. “When you compare apples to apples and start looking within subgroups, particularly journals launched after 2000 in biomedicine for example, the differences fall away.”
However, the authors identified a sector of low quality, OA publishers that are looking to capitalize on the article processing charge model rather than contribute to the advancement of science. Solomon said that this could partly be to blame for negative perceptions about the integrity of OA publishing as a whole and its impact on the peer review system. But most researchers are aware of these low-quality publishers and prefer to publish in more reputable OA journals.
In the end, Bjork and Solomon are hopeful that the study’s findings may help dispel some of the misconceptions in the debate over OA publishing. “Open access journals still have the reputation of being second class in the minds of some people. So, we think that this is important because this is objective data verifying that at least the open access journals published in the last 10 years by professional publishers are on par with subscription journals.”
References
Bjork, B. C., and D. Solomon. 2012. Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact. BMC Medicine. 10(1):73+.
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