I do some continuing medical education (CME) work on lung cancer topics, working with various CME companies on lectures, web conferences, and some audio interviews. I recently conducted some interviews with a couple of my friends and fellow lung cancer experts, including Dr. Nasser Hanna from Indiana University (and lead investigator for the HOG trial that has led to major questions about the value of consolidation chemo for stage III NSCLC, as described in a prior post) and Dr. Corey Langer from Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, a particular expert in treatment of elderly and poor performance status patients as well as small cell lung cancer. They’re part of a series called “Oncology Unplugged”, reminiscent of the MTV series of acoustic concerts (I’d definitely recommend Eric Clapton Unplugged, by the way) iin which the content was stripped down to a relatively simple and unadorned presentation.
These lectures focus on recent developments based on new data from ASCO 2007 and the recent meeting in Korea. They’re in podcast format, and they’re downloadable from this webpage at the Center for Biomedical Continuing Education for anyone who is interested. However, they are developed for an audience of oncologists, not patients, so they may have parts that aren’t as accessible to the general public as the material I’d develop specifically for OncTalk. They’re also a little formal (in the future, I think we’ll go for a looser, more conversational style), but it’s good to hear some perspectives other than just mine on the subject. Especially when they corroborate my take on these subjects (note, for instance, Dr. Hanna’s rather definitive stance against giving chemo and EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors like Tarceva concurrently). If this is a format that people like, let me know — we’re trying to figure out how to expand beyond just the text-based internet experience of OncTalk as the non-profit (Global Resource for Advancing Cancer Education, or GRACE) moves forward.
It’s not the most popular offering yet on ITunes, but it’s a start…
posted by Dr. West @ 10:09 pm link to this post
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October 11th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
Dr. West:
The interview with Dr. Hanna was quite interesting and, for me, timely as well. I just finished a full year on Avastin (along with Taxol/Carbo the first 4 months) with better results than I had a right to expect, and last night I took my first Tarceva tablet. Aside from the info on those drugs, I was intrigued by the discussion of new things in the pipeline and the potential for combining various targeted therapies.
I had fun installing and playing with iTunes, which I hadn’t used before, but I found it quite a challenge on one of my older machines still running Windows 2000 with a 1GB processor and 256MB of RAM. In March, when you posted the interviews with Drs. Kim, Curran, Langer, and Cohen, you included PDF files which included transcripts and the associated charts. This allowed me to keep the charts displayed in Adobe Reader and play the audio in VLC Media Player, which is far less of a resource hog than iTunes or even Windows Media Player. The transcripts are nice to have, but not as essential as the charts. I’m probably not the only one making do with older equipment either by choice or by necessity, so providing PDFs of the charts whenever a new interview is posted might be helpful to others too.
Many thanks and Aloha,
Ned
October 11th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Thanks for the feedback, Ned. This particular short series was more of a quick and dirty project, and it doesn’t include the transcripts and charts, but I’ll relay your comments back to CBCE. They may very well be influenced by this as they plan further projects over the next 1-2 years. And GRACE will likely be doing similar work, so it’s good to hear back from people about what works and where the pitfalls are.
-Dr. West