Analysis: Scandal heats up as ASCO begins

CHICAGO, June 1 (UPI) -- More than 31,000 cancer and health care professionals crowded into Chicago's spacious McCormick Place Convention Center Friday as the 43rd annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology began scrutinizing 4,000 scientific abstracts, trying to determine which ones might change the way patients are treated.

In turn, officials of the organization have been struggling with how to keep the information in those abstracts confidential until the time of the meeting, a task that Allan Lichter, executive vice president of ASCO, admitted is difficult.

A report published in the Wall Street Journal about one month in advance of the ACSO meeting highlighted a phenomenon seen in recent years of biotech stocks careening wildly upward or downward in the months before the pivotal medical conference, leading to speculation that ASCO doctors are not keeping the confidential and highly anticipated data to themselves.

"You would have to have your head in the sand not to realize that some people are going to use the information in these abstracts to try to move stocks," Lichter told UPI.

However, he said, "It's extremely hazardous to make a call on the basis of an abstract. Every year we see abstracts of scientific studies -- a 250-word synopsis -- that looks very good and it turns out not to be so terrific when all the data are discussed at the meeting. Similarly, there are abstracts that look like a big yawn when you first read them and then are really impressive when the data are discussed."

Observers have criticized organizations such as ASCO that deal with results of clinical trials because leaks of that information may give some stock traders an unfair advantage in selling pharmaceutical company stocks.

However, Lichter said that the data in the abstract are at least six to seven months old, and in the time interval the results can change 180 degrees,

"Nevertheless, we know that people use this data to make decisions on the market so every year, as soon as the meeting is over, we sit down and try to come up with ways of tightening our control on the data," he told UPI. He said previous attempts to withhold all information had not gone over well with the general membership.

Of the 4,000 or so abstracts received by ASCO, Lichter said that only about five or six are likely to be strong enough to move a stock, but figuring out which ones will do it is the challenge. "There are about 76 abstracts here from Lilly (Eli Lilly, based in Indianapolis)," he said, "but it's unlikely one can tell which of those studies will be meaningful to the stock market."

Lichter commented during a press briefing that opened the five-day meeting and focused on problems with getting government funding for cancer research. "The flat government funding for the National Cancer Institute has slowed the pace of progress in cancer treatment," said Robert Ozols, chair of ASCO's communications committee and an ovarian cancer specialist at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

John Niederhuber, director of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., said researchers have continued at NCI "even though we have been working with a less-than-inflation level budget."

Ozols said that the major impact at Fox Chase has been that increases in the health budget led to improvements in the laboratory infrastructure, but lack of budget increases has meant that few of the research projects built on that infrastructure are being funded.

Lichter said that over the last 30 years, five-year cancer survival has improved from 51 percent to 66 percent. He said that the impact of that change in survival to the Unites States economy could be "calculated in the hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars."