Saturday 6 October 2012

Apple Inc rules

At the recent ESMO (European Society of Medical Oncology) conference it was fantastic to see the number of folk who have iPhones and iPads. If they needed a laptop it was nearly always a Macbook Air.

Nearly 16500 delegates under one roof, everyone with a device to get onto the Internet and they crashed the Net server a few times.

The power of group computing.

Herceptin duration

A few years ago when Herceptin (trastuzumab) was launched for the early stage of Her2+ breast cancer, the timing of treatment was fixed at one year. Why one year? No clue. Just a consensus figure decided by the oncology investigators.

At the European Oncology meeting held in the end of Sep 2012 - data from large studies were presented. The two main studies were comparing one year versus six months of Herceptin - this showed that probably one year is better than six months. The other study of one year versus two years showed that one is probably enough.

So the consensus a few years ago, was right. Twelve months is the magic figure (for now).