Key takeaways from ASCO's annual meeting; PhRMA overview

Mike Ybarra, emergency medicine physician and vice president of medical affairs and strategic alliances at Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), has posted his overview of this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology's (ASCO) annual meeting.

Last weekend, health care professionals, patients, scientists and biopharmaceutical researchers gathered for the ASCO annual meeting. With over 200 sessions and 2,500 poster presentations on the latest advances in cancer therapy, the future of cancer diagnosis and treatment is promising.

In just the last few decades, biopharmaceutical companies have made ground-breaking advances in the research and development (R&D) of targeted therapies,  immunotherapies and cell-based therapies for conditions ranging from non-small-cell lung cancer to metastatic melanoma to blood cancers. Those achievements have helped to personalize cancer care, providing patients with more targeted treatments beyond traditional chemotherapy, and contributed greatly to  recent accelerated declines in cancer death rates. As a result of tremendous treatment advances over the years, cancer death rates have fallen by  32% since peaking in the mid-1990s.