TIA Centre: News

American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Conference (29th May - 2nd June 2025)

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual conference is the premier event for showcasing advancements in clinical oncology. Attracting over 40,000 attendees each year, this conference has been held at the McCormick Conference Centre in Chicago, Illinois, for many years due to its sheer scale. This year's line-up promised many high-profile and impressive clinical trials, so I felt honoured to be able to attend and present my work.

Chicago is a city that has always fascinated me – home to many famous TV programmes, Al Capone, and muse of Frank Sinatra, not to mention the deeply dividing marmite of American cuisine – deep dish pizza.

My journey from sunny Birmingham to windy Chicago (via London) took about 20 hours door-to-door, including one taxi, one train, two tubes, one flight, and one subway. Despite the long travel, I was welcomed by street signs and banners around the city, greeting ASCO attendees warmly.

On arrival, I marched straight to Giordano’s, a famous Chicago-based deep dish pizza restaurant. Exceptionally tired, I still managed to eat a small deep dish pizza, which I can confirm was more like a pie than a pizza – albeit very tasty, surely infuriating our Italian neighbours. Following this I went exploring the city, taking in sights around Millenium Park, such as the famous Cloud Gate sculpture, or more colloquially known as “The Bean”, for obvious reasons. Walking along the famous Chicago Riverwalk and heading to the shore to view Lake Michigan – a truly spectacular lake. With just the lake to see ahead of you, it’s easy to understand how it was first mistaken for the ocean.

The conference lasted for 5 days, and the scale was awe-inspiring. The main conference rooms could fit thousands of people in, dwarfing any other conference that I have ever attended. Each day consisted of presentations by authors for 10 minutes, followed by a 10-minute rebuttal presentation by another scientist/clinician, and then a panel discussion on the paper. This format was marvellous – watching scientists and clinicians interact with such passion, demonstrating the merits and pitfalls of their clinical trials and ultimately fighting to show how their work would benefit patients. In one session, I was struck when, at the end of a presentation demonstrating a new drug in head and neck cancer, many members of the audience stood up and started clapping – truly remarkable. Each day, a news bulletin went out showing the latest advances in cancer research and what breaking results would be presented at the conference that day.

The exhibition hall at ASCO was like nothing I have ever seen before. It was the size of a small city, packed with every pharmaceutical or medical company you have ever heard of and more. With companies such as AstraZenaca, GSK and Roche fighting for business, competing over who had the bigger and better stand with the best free coffee on offer. Escaping this, you could find therapy dogs roaming the conference offering support. Indeed, I said hello to a lovely cockapoo named Ruby from the Canine Therapy Corps, who seemed absolutely shattered after a day of providing therapy to the people of America.

On the day of my poster presentation, I was again taken aback by the scale of the session – over 500 posters and a 3 hour session to present your work. Here, I took the opportunity to present my work on using AI to improving diagnosis and biomarker discovery in laryngeal dysplasia, a precursor lesion to laryngeal cancer. My previous work has been on a similar disease also in the head and neck called oral epithelial dysplasia. So it was great to be able to apply similar methods to the larynx and also get similar findings – especially in the new finding of the potential significance of lymphocytes – immune cells – around the epithelium being predictive of dysplasia severity and potentially cancer progression. Following my presentation, it was great to also see my abstract published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (link below). During this session, I spoke to many people interested in AI, computational pathology, and head and neck dysplasias. Indeed, I spoke to a few people who had recognised the work of the ANTICIPATE project and were interested in collaborating in the future and potentially sharing data.

But the conference wasn’t all work and no play. On Saturday, I was delighted to find the Champions League Final playing on one of the big screens at the conference. I found myself mixed among mostly French and Italian oncologists, all engrossed in the game as PSG battered Inter Milan 5-0. On Sunday, the day ended with wine tasting, backing on to Lake Michigan, forming the most scenic backdrop, as we sipped wine paired with cheese, listening to how and where they were made from around the USA.

Other highlights included climbing the Wallis tower, which at 527m was the tallest building in the world until 1996. The view from the Skydeck and the infamous ledge, leaning out over the skyline, was impressive. I enjoyed many more deep dish pizzas and BBQ from "Frank Sinatra’s favourite BBQ joint in Chicago" – Twin Anchors. I also visited the comedy club "The Second City" to see a series of sketches, with jokes mostly aimed at the current administration in the USA, drawing many similarities to "The Lord of the Rings". Being a parkrun enthusiast, I also made the trip to Western Springs on the Saturday morning to complete the 5km “Spring Rock” run at 8AM. Thinking this was a rather scenic part of Chicago, I only later found out that this town has been often dubbed the wealthiest suburb in the US.

The journey home was long and jet-lagging, taking closer to 30 hours this time, with me napping between train/tube changes. A delayed flight but only by half an hour.

Overall, this was a fantastic conference, and I would highly recommend attending. As a computer scientist, much of the presented work was very clinical by nature. Yet, it is too easy for us computer scientists to get detached from the clinical reality of the research that we are doing. There were further education sessions on Day 1, such as a Genomics 101 session, which I attended and learned lots. Attending ASCO was an experience I would recommend to anyone interested in science and the fight against cancer. Conferences are an amazing mixing pot of people allowing new ideas to form and collaborations to foster. ASCO was certainly no exception to this.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Cancer Research UK for funding Adam.

Contributions from the TIA Centre:

Adam Shephard [Poster Presentation]: AI-based classification of laryngeal dysplasia and lymphocytic activity quantification from routine histology. Link to paper.

By Adam Shephard