The 51st Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology was held in Chicago, IL from May 29-June 2, 2015. This year, much like in the past few meetings, immunotherapies dominated the conference. However, if the last few meetings highlighted the emergence of immunotherapies, then this year’s meeting marked their arrival. Indeed, Karnosfsky Award lecturer, Dr. Suzanne Topalian, declared that immunotherapies had already earned their place as the fourth pillar of cancer therapy (along with surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy). It should be noted that the vast majority of the excitement surrounding immunotherapies is really driven specifically by anti-PD-1 drugs, and there were several major PD-1 presentations at this meeting. New pivotal data were shown for Opdivo (nivolumab, BMY) in non- squamous cell lung cancer and melanoma along with early data in HCC. New data were also presented for Keytruda (pembrolizumab, MRK) in head & neck and bladder cancer. Another major theme for the meeting was a new willingness to discuss the cost and value of new therapies. Indeed, a presentation in the major plenary session by Dr. Leonard Saltz was devoted to the skyrocketing costs of new therapies and need to weigh value and financial considerations into treatment decisions. Numerous other discussants incorporated a costs analysis in their post-presentation summaries as well.

This post-meeting report is a compilation of our coverage of the 2015 ASCO meeting. The report includes:

• A list of all of the ASCO data events we have added into BioMedTracker
• Summaries of key presentations, including added commentary by our Scientific Analysts attending the meeting
• Companion diagnostic coverage from our new sister product, MedDeviceTracker

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