Highlights of the 27th Annual BSMO Meeting

Gabry Kuijten and Liese Vandeborne were the Anticancer Funds' eyes and ears during the first day of the 2025 meeting of the Belgian Society of Medical Oncology (BSMO). An insight into their take-home messages here below:

• The organising team, led by BSMO president Evandro Azambuja , did a great job in drawing up an attractive programme. The sessions were hosted interactively, involving oncologists and researchers from all over the country including old pros and enthusiastic youngsters.
• Yannick Van Herck of the University Hospital in Leuven made us critically look at guidelines for treatment of TNBC. They are not fully applicable to patients who relapse early since this specific population was excluded from the trials on which the recommendations are based. Thus, this very poor prognosis population deserves high scientific priority, and participation in clinical trials, even for first-line treatment, should be considered.
• We are all very familiar with the use of gene expression profiling (GEP) in postmenopausal breast cancer patients, helping oncologists and patients decide about adjuvant treatment and answer the question “Is it reasonably save to omit chemotherapy?”. But what was new to us is that GEP is also being investigated for its appropriateness to help answer other questions: “Can chemo be omitted in luminal breast cancer or premenopausal patients? Can it help to decide for or against anthracyclines as adjuvant chemo? Should endocrine therapy be extended or not?”. Eline naert of University Hospital of Ghent nicely presented the existing data, pointed out what’s missing and concluded that GEP is not ready to be implemented in clinical practice this way.
• With rumbling stomachs, we listened to Elisabeth De Waele from the University Hospital of Brussels just before lunchbreak. As intensivist, surgeon and nutritionist, she may feel an outsider, but her talk was spot on. Data is clear: 20% of deaths among cancer patients is caused by cachexia, and cachexia, treated effectively with nutritional support, impacts outcomes. If there’s one aspect patients can and should be empowered for, it’s nutrition. But obviously, first every patient needs a nutritional care plan – which is only the case today in a small minority despite recent data showing 25% of patients in Belgium is malnourished. The message is clear: every hospital should integrate nutritional therapy within their oncology practice.
• A sense of unfairness for the dedifferentiated liposarcoma patient population overcame us when Patrick Schöffski of the University Hospital of Leuven presented the BRIGHTLINE-1 trial results. Brigimadlin seemed promising but unfortunately, the company had to pull the plug and shelve the compound when doxorubicin overperformed in the trial and no benefit of the MDM2-p53 antagonist over this standard of care could be shown. So we wonder, can doxorubicin's efficacy be improved in clinical practice benefitting patients outside of the trial?
• We were enthused by Marthe Verhaert ’s presentation on the Belgian Multidisciplinary Immunotoxicity Board (BITOX) initiative of Sandrine Aspeslagh of the University Hospital of Brussels. Twice a month submitted cases of immune related side effects (irAEs) during immunotherapy are being discussed among a team of doctors to advice on appropriate management. In the past 3 years, almost 250 cases were discussed in the board and more are coming in every day. With the quote “Many minds are better than one”, a call to action was launched to collaborate among hospitals not only for management of those complex cases, but also in research projects on irAEs. We fully support this and therefore would like to help raise awareness on powerful initiatives like BITOX.