• 67% of businesses post video to their own sites while 61% post to social media sites
• 52% say they’ve used video email marketing and 88% of them stated it had a positive impact
• 64% believe they will see an increase in their video marketing budgets for this year while 17% thought it would remain stable
• 29% said their video marketing budget would drop this year
• 76% believe that online video increases click through rates while 17% say no and 7% say they don’t know
• 72% believe that online video marketing raises purchase intent/conversion

In terms of the major barrier to online video in email marketing, 41% say that the availability of video assets was the problem while 25% said ease of implementation. Furthermore, 18% cited cost as a major barrier meaning either they thought video production was too expensive or the implementing of video marketing was too complicated.

It’s an interesting report that clearly shows that many businesses realise the potenital of online video marketing but are still challenged by how to go about doing it. One thing’s for certain though, businesses implementing a marketing campaign that includes online video are seeing the results.

Sectors using Online Video Marketing:

While video marketing in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors is still in it’s infancy we are already seeing interest in this area grow as channels such as ecancer.tv provide a ready made target audience, just waiting to digest new educational video content.  And for our hospital clients, video is proving a very successful tool for marketing their services to potential patients. Check out The Wellington Hospital as a case in point.

In the past, e-learning has been focused on Computer Based Training (CBT) and Web Based Training (WBT). But with the rapid development of mobile technology, it is no surprise that e-learning has had to adapt to the learning opportunities offered by portable technologies.

Mobile learning (m-learning) now delivers education in the form of apps and delivery to mobile browsers, but is sure to change and accomodate the quickly developing world of mobile technology.

For organisations with remote teams, such as a sales force, deploying important training via the iPad for example, will make learning on the move a reality, saving time and money.

We see video-to-mobile as a core component of mobile learning content (mLearning). You can say more in a three-minute film than in 100 pages of text; it’s the perfect learning medium to communicate big ideas in a  simple and compelling format – be it film or motion graphics.

Instructional videos help learners understand complex product information, complicated installation or assembly processes, and demonstrate effective sales or customer service techniques.

For patients, using video, with real doctors, nurses and patients explaining their disease, what to expect from their treatment and the importance of compliance to the effectiveness of their therapy can now de delivered to mobile so that the patient and their families have access to vital information without being tied to a DVD player.

For internal audiences, videos are also an excellent method to communicate the vision, mission and values of the organisation. A short video interview of the top management is an excellent way to communicate the goals or the organisation and welcome new employees.

CBT has brought about real benefits in terms of access to learning and efficiency for the provider and learner. This access and efficiency will increase exponentially as the rapid growth of smart phones and tablets continues and their technology improves.

Stephen Dunn

We just love the YouTube video announcing the recruitment of top British cyclist Rob Hayles as the new Near Naked Man Cycling Ambassador.

Near Naked Man is the champion for Male Cancer Awareness Campaign’s  (MCAC) campaign to combat the embarrassment that prevents men from discussing their bodily functions and getting tested for prostate cancer.

Using a creative approach to appeal to men’s sense of humour, MCAC want to reach a mass audience of men and those who care about them – whatever their age, culture, religion or sexuality. By getting the message across to younger men then perhaps they’ll remember it when they’re older and recognise the early warning signs in their older friends and relatives.

The Near Naked Man outfit is the world’s most eye catching cycling apparel, its purpose is to raise awareness and reduce embarrassment of male cancer. With Rob’s support they’re asking as many people as possible to sign up to their fundraising website www.ballsoutchallenge.org and help raise awareness of male cancer. Anyone who signs up to one of the charity challenges will be invited to a special Rob Hayles’ training day that will finish in the evening with their ‘end of season awards’ hosted by Rob and his special guests. Rob is a three times Olympic medalist and double track world champion and is one of the most experienced and respected riders in British cycling.

This is a memorable and creative disease awareness campaign that will appeal to the target audience of younger men (blokes) and the use of social video to deliver the message is wonderfully executed. Great job.

Who’s going to get their balls out then?

The campaign certainly is clever to use Facebook’s new Timeline feature, and points to the endless possibilities that the Timeline could offer. But in terms of communicating effectively with addicts and even deterring young people from becoming drug users in the first place, the campaign appears to fail.

Commissioned by Israel’s Anti-Drug Authority, the campaign portrays Barak in the stereotypical Trainspotting image. After a year with drugs, the ‘junkie’ is red-eyed, covered in bruises, unshaven and dirty. He has lost his girlfriend, been thrown out of his house and forced to sleep rough on the streets while begging for change to fund his habit. But how effective is this as an advert? As many people who actually deal with drug users know, they do not all fit this stereotype.

In fact, this type of flawed reporting or exaggurated campaign has the potential to cause drug-users to distrust the media. If an individual’s experience does not tally with media portrayal, they may not only disregard that information, but also distrust all the information they are given. For example the amount of coverage given to ecstasy related deaths, coverage which does not tally with many young peoples’ experiences, may mean young people are less willing to accept the media reporting on the longer term health implications of ecstasy.

The campaign clearly depicts a drug ‘addict’ in comparison to a user. Barak is portrayed as someone whose whole life is turned upside-down by substances; someone who has become psychologically dependent on narcotics to ‘feel normal’. If a real drug addict came across this campaign, do you think they would drop their needles and seek help at the nearest clinic?

In comparison, many frequent drug-users who would be likely to come across Barak’s timeline are independent, active professionals who are not lacking in self-esteem. Unlike Adam Barak’s ‘drug persona’ they have jobs, houses and families. So how do you effectively communicate an anti-drugs message to this group of people?

According to the website DrugScope:

‘Hyperbolic stories do not scare young people away from trying drugs as many may think, in fact evidence suggests that it may even achieve the opposite result. Research has also suggested that the prominence given to ecstasy related harm in the media, has, rather than encouraging young people not to experiment, simply switched their drug of choice from ecstasy to cocaine, a drug generally recognised as much more harmful. Scare stories may also cause parents to react in an inappropriate way to drug use, which can alienate young people and drive them further away from help.’

Furthermore, a recent international review published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (2011) makes this startling admission:

‘…do antidrug media campaigns prevent drug use? This first systematic review finds no strong evidence that they do and some that they can have the opposite effect.’

It cites a study of secondary school children who saw anti-cannabis adverts and then were randomly allocated to engage or not engage in an on-line ‘chat’ about the ads.

‘Compared to those who did not, youngsters who chatted following exposure to the ads subsequently recorded more pro-cannabis and less anti-cannabis beliefs or attitudes, more peer pressure to use cannabis, and less disapproval of cannabis use by adult authority figures.’

So what we can we glean from this information and reaction to the Anti-Drugs Facebook Timeline campaign? Certainly the idea of an authoritarian ‘one size fits all’ war on drugs is hopelessly inaccurate. The biggest challenge for an anti-drugs campaign is how to get young people to say no to drugs when they probably have friends who said yes to drugs and liked it. Most of the time, it’s even their friends who are encouraging them to take drugs in the first place. In order to effectively communicate in this area requires an understanding of motivation, behaviour, and the power of social influence. Drugs have different effects and different risks, so young people need information about the dangers at a more local level.

Rather than bullish imagery of vulnerable drug addicts, anti-drugs campaigns would do better to take a pragmatic and realisitic approach, providing honest and up-to-date drug information while encouraging informed debate. It is drug education delivered in the proper context (rather than gimmicky social media campaigns) that have far more potential to reduce drug misuse and to delay the onset of experimentation. And Facebook has already removed Barack’s false profile for breaking it’s terms of service anyway.

Every year in December, about 21,000 haematologists and health professionals  – as well as a small number of patient advocates – met at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Haematology (ASH) in San Diego to learn about latest news from research in leukemias, lymphomas and other blood disorders. We have attended the scientific Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML) sessions at ASH 2011 and are summarising the most important presentations and posters, complemented by a patients’ perspective and an overview of patient advocacy activities at ASH.

CML Education Session

Traditionally, the first day of the ASH Congress features Education Sessions. These sessions provide haematologists with the overall picture on a specific disease, including its biology, standard of care, current therapeutic challenges, results from recent trials and future outlook. This year, Prof Neil Shah (USA), Andreas Hochhaus (Germany) and Junia Melo (Australia) presented the state of play in CML treatment and care.

Great success in CML – but not for all patients: Dr Neil Shah opened the session highlighting the 8 year results of the IRIS study, with only 7% of CML patients dying from CML within 8 years when treated with Imatinib as a first-line therapy. Life expectancy is close to that of the healthy population. Serious side effects of oral CML therapies are relatively rare and decreased in incidence within the first two years of therapy. However, about one third of newly diagnosed CML patients required alternate CML therapies due to no response, resistance or intolerance. Shah highlighted the importance of the milestones for suboptimal response and treatment failure defined in the ELN treatment recommendations.

To optimise response, the French SPIRIT study demonstrated that adding low-dosed pegylated Interferon to Imatinib might be beneficial. Looking at second generation drugs (Dasatinib, Nilotinib) in first line treatment, it was clearly demonstrated that progression rates into advanced disease were much lower on Nilotinib and Dasatinib than on Imatinib, while tolerability was comparable. However the Billion Dollar question remains unanswered whether the second generation CML drugs should be administered first-line. While efficacy is clearly superior to Imatinib, side effect issues and higher treatment costs require further consideration. Dr. Andreas Hochhaus (Germany) outlined that due to the successes of CML therapy, 250,000 Europeans will be alive by 2050 that have, or have had, CML, which brings challenges to healthcare budgets. Further trials will clarify the issues of optimisation of CML therapy, which might bring three phases – intensive induction, response consolidation and then potentially therapy discontinuation. Patients are highly encouraged to continue participating in trials.

To support that, Junia V Melo (Australia) highlighted that “operational cure”, with CML being under control while on continuous therapy, can only be seen as a partial success. Melo highlighted that a recent study had revealed that almost all “PCR undetectable patients” were still positive using the more sensitive DNA-based PCR, raising the question that “complete molecular response” may have been a failed promise. In addition, quality of life and treatment costs were major issues in long-term chronic management of CML with continuous therapy. Looking at stem cell transplant, the only curative treatment for CML today, Melo mentioned that even though it may cure, it is a “big price to pay” for many of the survivors, with chronic Graft-versus-Host-Diseases having a major impact on their quality of life.

For that reason, transplant does only play a minor role in CML treatment today, making up only 3% of transplantations, demonstrating the success of current oral therapies. However, Hochhaus outlined that transplantations in high risk CML patients were generally done too late today. He raised that in lower income countries, transplant costs might also be lower than life-long TKI therapy.

As a about half of patients in TKI-induced absence of residual disease have shown not to relapse after stopping therapy, discontinuation studies are a hot topic in CML in 2011. Melo outlined the results of the French STIM stop study where 41% of Imatinib patients in complete molecular response did not relapse within 18 months after cessation of all therapy. Another French study presented by Delphine Rea (France) outlined that relapse rates might be lower on second generation CML drugs. Prognostic factors which patients relapse after cessation and which don’t are still unclear though.

Stopping therapies after TKI treatment might be an option for a minority of CML patients. For all other patients, new drugs or immunological approaches are needed to selectively target the leukemic stem cell, as well as new diagnostic measures to monitor the effect of those treatments. Melo highlighted four strategies on targeting stem cells are currently addressed by researchers with new drugs: Inhibit self-renewal of stem cells, reverse the dormancy of stem cells to make them susceptible to TKI therapy, induce differentiation of stem cells, or induce cell death.

In terms of adherence to CML therapies, Hochhaus highlighted the results of the global patient network CML Advocates Network adherence study, where about one fifth of CML patients admitted to miss doses, and 7 out of 8 stated forgetfulness as the reason. With regards to tools to improve adherence, he stressed that patients don’t want to be reminded every day that they have CML. Hochhaus highlighted that the CML community is an outstanding example in patient advocacy, not to be seen in many other cancers, which has become a credible partner of clinicians and industry, as well as an independent political voice on access to diagnostics and therapy, reimbursement and information to patients.

CML Patients’ perspective on the Clinical  Sessions on CML

“Can we aim at a cure?” This was probably the leading question lingering behind many presentations at ASH this year. The question was first expressed by Junia V Melo (Australia) in the Education Session on CML, but also in many other presentations and posters discussing ‘operational’ vs ‘real’ cure, therapy optimisation to increase complete molecular response rates, discontinuation studies, new mechanisms to target stem cells, and improvement of diagnostics to detect minimal residual disease on a very low molecular level.

The performance of the approved CML therapies continues to improve over time. Giuseppe Saglio presented the 3 year follow-up data of the ENESTnd study that compared Nilotinib with Imatinib as a first-line treatment. Compared to the 24 month data presented at ASH, there have been no surprises – which are good news for patients: no increase in liver events, no patient discontinued due to blood sugar levels, no worrying cardiac issues observed. The 3 years follow-up demonstrates that Nilotinib is clearly superior to Imatinib for treating newly diagnosed CML patients, with faster and higher response rates across all risk groups, and a significantly lower risk of progression, and connected to that, lower risk of death. To assess whether dose escalation of Nilotinib to 2x400mg, or a switch from Imatinib to Nilotinib 2x400mg, is an option for those that responded on ENESTnd suboptimally or failed therapy, Dr Andreas Hochhaus presented the ENESTnd extension study where slow responders could receive a higher dose of Nilotinib, or switch to Nilotinib if in the Imatinib arm. The switch was beneficial for a majority, so dose optimization has shown to be safe and increases responses.

Unfortunately no 30 month update of the DASISION study comparing Dasatinib and Imatinib in first line was presented at ASH 2011 (while at EHA 2011, both 24 month data of Nilotinib and Dasatinib was presented, allowing a comparison of both new 2nd generation drugs).

Dr. Jorge Cortes presented the 24 month follow-up data of the BELA trial with Bosutinib, another second generation TKI that is highly selective on BCR-ABL, being active against Dasatinib- and Nilotinib-resistant mutations except T315I and V299L. While the primary endpoint of the trial was not reached as complete cytogenetic responses were not shown to be different between Bosutinib and Imatinib, molecular response rates were significantly superior. Bosutinib may offer a new therapeutic option for patients with newly diagnosed CML, and was submitted for marketing approval in Europe and USA.

An update of the French SPIRIT trial combining Imatinib and pegylated Interferon, after dose optimization of Interferon which improved tolerability largely, suggested that the Imatinib-PegIFN combination is clearly superior to Imatinib alone, significantly improving response rates.

Dr. François-Xavier Mahon (France) presented an update on the French Imatinib discontinuation study “STIM”. 61% of patients lost their molecular response within 22 months. Dr Mahon clearly stated that he would recommend discontinuation only within a clinical trial with close molecular monitoring. Taking into account the number of months without treatment in the study, Dr Mahon added that the savings within the STIM trial for the French healthcare system alone were estimated at 4 million Euros.

Exciting news were presented on Ponatinib (AP24534) as well as early data on DCC-2036. Both drugs have the capabilities of targeting T315I, which may be the “last bastion” in chronic phase CML. With Imatinib, Dasatinib and Nilotinib as approved therapies, Bosutinib striving for market authorisation, Ponatinib demonstrating very convincing data even way beyond T315I, we’re moving towards a situation not dreamt of just 10 years ago: With CML patients having an equivalent risk of dying from CML than dying from any other cause and, and with a series of highly effective drugs available for battling any kind of nasty mutation – if CML is diagnosed early. Important research findings on quality of life data, data on co-morbidities like diabetes, and the special challenges of elderly patients have been presented as well – which is important for patients facing life-long treatment of a chronic disease.

Unfortunately, there is little progress on the front of advanced phase and blast phase CML. A rough estimate of 90% of all presentations at ASH 2011 addressed only chronic phase CML. High-risk stem cell transplant remains the only viable option in blast phase, but outlook is grim even for the strongest patient. Apart from that, Melo raised the question how cured patients really are after stem cell transplant — even in the case when they survived the transplant and achieved complete absence of CML.

With the prospect of having generic Imatinib in 2015 and 2016 in many markets, some presentations this year seemed already to take account of new market dynamics that will arise. In many talks with experts, you could feel that Imatinib might get a second rise, or might remain first line treatment in many less well-off countries for a while. Current findings on assessing early response to Imatinib and early switching to more powerful second generation drugs in case of of suboptimal response might become even more relevant.

Patient Advocacy at ASH

Other than the EHA Annual Meeting, the ASH congress features no dedicated sessions on patient advocacy topics within the scientific programme. About two dozen patient advocates from the areas of leukemia, myeloma and lymphoma, well-connected in strong global networks, attended ASH 2011. This year’s patient advocates at ASH came from all across the world, including USA, Canada, Israel, Germany, UK, Spain, The Netherlands, Argentina, Venezuela, India, China, Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia, just to name a few countries.

Patient advocacy in haematology has evolved largely over recent years from being ‘patient support groups’ to being globally operating advocacy networks that closely collaborate with researchers, clinicians and industry – not only to learn about newest results of clinical trials and to meet world leading experts, but also to contribute to clinical trials, and to support the definition research priorities based on a unique insight on patient needs.

Patient advocates were particularly pleased that Dr. Andreas Hochhaus’ presentation in the CML education session drew special attention to the special role of patient advocates. “The CML community is an outstanding example of global patient advocacy – not to be seen in many other cancers,” Hochhaus said, “Patient advocates have become an independent, strong community, credible partners, advisors of clinicians, research projects and industry, as well as a strong political voice”.

Read more about CML at ASH 2011 in the following articles:

A more detailed report on the CML Education Session, the iCMLf Forum for physicians from emerging countries, clinical updates on the Nilotinib, Dasatinib, Bosutinib, Ponatinib, DCC-2036, Imatinib-Interferon combination, STOP studies, as well as some studies on CML and diabetes or fatigue are available on the CML Advocates Network .

• CML Advocates Network: ASH 2011: Summary of Education Session on CML
• CML Advocates Network: ASH 2011: Key presentations and the patients’ perspective
• iCMLf Forum 2011 at ASH: Physicians spotlight challenges of managing CML in emerging countries
• Biotech Strategy Blog: CML update from 2011 ASH annual meeting
• Twitter Hashtag #ASH11
• American Society of Haematology: ASH Abstracts 2011

About the author:

Jan Geissler is founder and managing director of Patvocates, acting in the area of cancer policy, patient advocacy and social media. After his studies (diploma in Business Management in the UK and Germany), Jan held various managerial positions in telecommunications and media industry think tanks before he focused his professional life on patient advocacy in 2008. Being a leukemia survivor who participated in various clinical trials himself, Jan founded the online patient community Leukämie-Online/LeukaNET in 2002 which is one of the most frequented online platforms for leukemia patients on the German speaking Internet today. In 2003, he co-founded the European Cancer Patient Coalition (European umbrella association of more than 300 cancer patient groups) and became its first full time director 2008. In 2007, Jan also co-founded the CML Advocates Network which is connecting 62 leukaemia patient groups from 49 countries on all continents today. He is a patients’ representative in various steering committees and advisory boards, acting e.g. as Secretary of the European Forum for Good Clinical Practice (EFGCP), in the EU Committee of Experts for Rare Diseases (EUCERD), in the ESMO Patient Working Party, in the ECCO Patient Advisory Committee, in the Editorial Board of the Journal of European CME, in the Institutional Review Board of EORTC, in the International CML Foundation, and in the External Advisory Board of the University Clinic of Jena. He also acts as an independent external EU expert.

You can follow Jan on Twitter: @jangeissler and view his LinkedIn profile here.

Mentionmapp is an inspiring tool that allows you to visually monitor your Twitter network. From looking at connections and conversations, users can discover which people interact the most, what they are actually talking about, and which people are relevant to follow on Twitter.

To use Mentionmapp, simply log on and enter any Twitter user name to view an interactive map of connections that you can explore.

By loading each user’s Twitter updates, Mentionmapp finds the people they connect with and the hashtags they have used the most. The data is displayed using a  Constellation Framework, where mentions become connections, and discussions between multiple users emerge as clusters. Clicking a user will display their network of mentions as well as details from their profile.

This graph visualisation uses custom node renderers which display profile images, usernames, and hashtags. The appearance of each node changes depending on its distance from the select user or hashtag. Very cool.

As information is loaded gradually from Twitter, nodes and edges will appear on your Mentionmapp and the layout will shift to accommodate them. Mentionmapp doesn’t index an entire stream of Tweets, it just uses the most recent tweets to create a map. But since the people that you mention the most are likely to have been mentioned by you recently, the map should still be fairly accurate.

To show you which of your conversation topics are most talked about, the lines drawn between nodes gradually become thicker and draw your attention to big discussions. By hovering over an edge you can also reveal the exact number of mentions.

Ever-changing, ever-interesting and ever-visual, watching your Mentionmapp grow and develop can become somewhat of an addiction!

We love this is a great new dynamic visualisation tool. What do you think?

Post by: Stephen Dunn

More than 1,500 people gathered in San Francisco last week to hear and share the cutting edge of innovation in health-care and information technology.  Innovation was, indeed, the buzzword of the conference. Under the rubric of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act signed into law by President Obama on January 4, 2011, the Office for the National Coordination of Health Information Technology, ONC has partnered with Health 2.0 to run its Investing in Innovation i2 Challenge series.

Health 2.0 Senior VP Jean-Luc Neptune and Health 2.0 CEO Indu Subaiya presented the 2011 edition of the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge Competition. The competition awards prizes ($!) to accelerate the development of solutions to key challenges in health information technology, by providing a “jumping platform” for those innovative start ups who would not make it without an external initial help, as put by Special Assistant of Innovations and Research at ONC Wil Yu.

On Monday, September 26^th, the four semifinalists of the NCI challenge were presented by Abdul Shaikh, Program Director at Division Cancer Control and Population Sciences at NCI. The NCI challenge – a subgroup of the i2 challenge – aims at using public data as input for innovating the whole spectrum of cancer prevention and control.

Among the four semifinalists, Ask Dory, an interactive search tool that aids patients to find suitable clinical trial near them, stands out for originality. With the advent of web 2.0 tools it is becoming more and more common for individual patients and their families to turn to the internet looking for active, recruiting clinical trials that may suit them.  Often though, patients and their families are overwhelmed by the maze of online information written in scientific and medical jargon. ‘Dory’ will help the patients to get beyond that kind of impasse, by asking the user personalized questions on their disease and then suggesting appropriate clinical trials near them (within a user-defined mile range), while also providing the email of the principal investigator or physician to contact for showing interest in participating in the trial. For now, Dory is helping only patients based in the US (as it uses data derived from ClinicalTrials.gov), but we hope it may serve as a model for a similar EU-based search tool.

While Ask Dory is designed for patients, my Cancer Genome is a product that targets clinicians, as it helps doctors navigate through the most recent advances in cancer genomics and find the most appropriate targeted treatment for their patients, based on genotype.  The tool works in three steps: first, clinicians insert a ‘cancer type’; then to select a ‘gene’ to retrieve information about its significance within the disease; and third to select a ‘gene mutation’ to understand its relevance for treatment and prognosis, and possibly to find clinical trials that could match a patient’s mutated genotype. While currently the choice of diseases is limited to breast cancer, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, GIST, thymic carcinoma and melanoma, it will expand as the team is going to develop further ‘my Cancer Genome’ for the second round of competition that is coming up soon.

Health Owl is another semifinalist and an application for web and mobile platforms designed to render cancer screening process and decision making more simple and reliable both for patients and for clinicians. (To note: colored tags were distributed to each participant to help identify visually the different categories of people present at the event, i.e. patient, doctor, investor, IT person, etc.) The ‘Owl’ is developed by a team based at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and uses publicly available data from screening generated from NCI’s Physician Data Query and PubMed to provide tailored cancer screening recommendations to the user based on recorded cancer family history and demographic variables. The Owl also offers a practical help by providing an action plan and assisting the patients in identifying physicians for the follow up on screening.

Direct competitor to the Owl is mHealth mPowered, a mobile health development company started by two MD/PhD students and a biomedical engineer based in Baltimore, Maryland. They developed ‘The Cancer App’, a smartphone application that provides the user with personalized information on how to reduce cancer risk.  The database covers over 400 items such as foods, drugs, chemicals and lifestyle choices, that are implicated in increasing or decreasing the risk for cancer, and cited rigorously from the authorities on cancer prevention (as rigorous source citation is one of the requirement of the i2 challenge).

Each of the four start-up semifinalists was awarded $10,000, while also receiving targeted and invaluable feedback on how to develop its product further. The deadline for the second round of development is November 18th. In Phase II, up to two winning teams out of the current four will be chosen and will each receive a $20,000 award at an international system sciences conference to be held in January 2012 in a TBD-location. Stay tuned on this blog to hear about the winners and other exciting launches at Health 2.0!

Stephen Dunn

To date the congress Twitter community has published over 3200 tweets covering a wide range of topics – you can analyse these  yourself via our searchable twitter database.

Top therapy area mentions goes to:

382 – GI

320 – Breast

134 – Prostate

122 – Lung

Top company mentions goes to:

61 – Novartis

49 – Roche

31 – Boehringer

15 – Bayer

9 – Amgen

6 – Astellas

There were a number of well placed, very large screens aggregating the #emcc2011 Twitter community conversation at key locations throughout the venue, which caused great interest and I am sure helped persuade delegates to participate.

(Day 1 twitter fall – early in the morning)

A Teaching Session on social media , entitled How Healthcare Professionals and Patient Groups are using Social Media was hosted by leading cancer patient advocate and epatient Jan Geissler, making the point that health on the Internet is the new norm for many doctors and patients and social media is being rapidly adopted by both groups. You can view the presentation from Jan below and view the other presentations here.

Introduction – Teaching Lecture on Social Media

Jan also chaired an education session in the patient advocacy session on Cancer and the Internet. During this session, Prof Richard Sullivan one of the project leads presented ecancerHub - the product of the two-year project Eurocancercoms, a European Commission FP7 funded initiative. The project, a partnership of Europe’s major cancer organisations and businesses led by the European Institute of Oncology in Milan, looked at issues and bottlenecks surrounding the communication and dissemination of cancer information across Europe, with the aim of establishing a single, efficient network for cancer communication in Europe. Sullivan stated “We have seen a huge growth in cancer information over the last 10 years, but much of this is fragmented, hard-to-access, and of questionable quality. Utilising a cutting edge social media platform developed by our technology partner (Brandcast Health), European partners have created the first integrated platform to deal with these issues and serve all members of the cancer community be they patients, poliymakers, professionals or scientists”

Professor Richard Sullivan discussing ecancerhub.

Also on the panel for the Cancer on Internet Session was Gilles Frydmen ACOR founder and participatory medicine champion. Gilles gave an insight into ACOR communities; social networks for epatients to share accurate and current information and data. Stating a case study with Gleevec where the GIST ACOR  community was mobilized, saving many lives and setting records for trial recruitment, he made the point that the patient is the most under-utilised resource of the healthcare system and networked patients are inventing and shaping a better healthcare model by being the source of authoritative answers for other patients.

Denis Costello, web communications officer for EURORDIS gave us some great examples of how patient communities are being served through social media. The Rare Disease Blog is providing e-advocacy by developing the patients’ voice, engagement via Twitter @eurordis and awareness via the Rare Disease Day platform.

Getting around the congress centre and finding which sessions to attend was made easy with the official congress app – I used the iPad version which had a great looking easy to navigate interface. Shame it didn’t have the abstracts loaded so that I could make notes against and share direct from the application to my colleagues back home, but it was a huge step forward. It also meant I didn’t have to carry the heavy programme  book around with me.

QR codes were pervasive – every exhibition panel had one – driving customers to documents, polls, information and other resources on their phone and tablet devices. (Apple appears to be the platform of choice for cancer professionals from what I could see). However, the award for best use of QR codes goes to Novartis for their innovate use in poster sessions – allowing you to download a pdf copy to your device, saving on printing costs and most importantly trees. Well done Novartis.

While in Stockholm I connected with many new friends both virtually and face to face. I was able organize via Twitter, G+ and LinkedIn to meet for the first time many friends that had previously existed only through online social networks.  We could feel the buzz in the congress centre and through the #emcc2011 community on Twitter, sharing with the world in an instant what was hot (or not). Never has it been more apparent to me that the dialogue between the medical profession and patients is becoming more open and the bridge between the two made closer through the power of social media.

I will certainly remember #EMCC2011 as a very socia(b)le and digitally integrated conference.

Stephen Dunn

PS – Conference organizers please note: #EMCC would suffice for next time, giving us 4 extra characters to communicate with

This year is the first time that the Medicine 2.0 conference is held in the US, after it was convened in Toronto in 2008 and 2009. The word ‘Medicine 2.0’ was coined by Gunther Eysenbach, associate professor of health policy at the University of Toronto and starter of the Medicine 2.0 conference in 2008. Gunther is also co-founder and group leader at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, Toronto, Canada, one of the leading world centers researching and developing applications on eHealth.

Denise Silber Medicine 2.0 from Larry Chu on Vimeo.

There are three main user groups of Medicine 2.0: patients/consumers, health care professionals and biomedical scientists and researchers. In the context of Medicine 2.0, even traditionally considered ‘end-users’ such as patients can be seen as experts and knowledge producers through their “collective wisdom,” opposing the traditional hierarchical and paternalistic structure of healthcare, where the doctors alone were the experts and the patients were supposed to follow doctors’ dictum without looking for more information or for a second opinion.

The following five features are essential of Medicine 2.0, as defined by Eysenbach:

1) social networking, involving the ‘explicit modelling of connections between people [...] which enables and facilitates collaboration and collaborative filtering processes’;

2) participation, particularly important for patients/consumers but also for health care professionals and researchers;

3) apomediation, i.e. the new way for users to identify trustworthy online information through a special form of ‘disintermediation’ where users rely less on traditional experts and authorities but increasingly more on crowdsourcing;

4) collaboration, both within and between the different user-groups of patients, doctors and scientists;

5) openness, which stands both for transparency and, in a more technical sense, for open source interfaces characteristics of web 2.0 tools.

The features listed above are reflected also in the breadth of abstracts accepted for oral presentations at the conference, from which we cherry picked some of the juiciest for you. To start with, the ‘father’ of the conference, Gunter Eysenbach and his coauthor Cynthia Chew will present one of the most recent outcomes of the crosstalk of internet and epidemiology, an open source tool called “Infovigil” which enables researchers to specify a “concept” (for example, a new influenza viral strain), and to prospectively track information and communication patterns on the internet. As some of these data can be coupled to geospatial data, they can be used to generate alerts for government if trends abruptly change, or other abnormalities occur.  In this sense Infovigil has great potential to inform public health policy, particularly in the case of influenza or other pandemics.

Participation is a central feature of Medicine 2.0 that is particularly important for consumers and patients. Katy Plant, research assistant at Stanford and part of the intramural Patient Education Center will present the results of a 6-week online workshop implemented by Stanford School of Medicine in collaboration with Cancer Research Center of Hawaii, and the McMillan Trust in the UK and aimed at improving quality of life for cancer patients. The workshop is one of the first of its kind to combine interactive didactic content, and structured social networking to help patients overcome fatigue, depression, stress, and sleep dysfunctions. As the results of the workshop were very promising, Stanford University is currently recruiting patients for a larger randomized trial.

Collaboration being another core value of Medicine 2.0, and within this theme, researchers will greatly benefit from one of the applications presented at Stanford this year: Mendeley. Mendeley is a London-based start up that aims at improving collaboration between scientists, providing a free reference manager and collaboration tool that crowd-sources research trend information and semantic annotations of research papers. Mendeley is not a new application, with the first beta public version released in 2008, but only last year did it reach a critical mass of users, with more than eight million scholarly papers currently in a database doubling in size every ten weeks.  Mendeley was created in 2007 by two PhD students, Jan Reichelt and Victor Henning who were “struggling to wrangle all of [their] research” and wondered if they “could write a program to extract all of the metadata from a PDF” (as featured and praised by the UK version of the magazine Wired. And this is exactly what they did: Mendeley automatically extracts metadata from papers, allows a researcher to annotate, tag and organize their research collection, and thus creates a network of collaborators out of a common interest.

The healthcare and social media scene for is buzzing on this side of the Pond too, with the Health 2.0 Europe conference coming up soon in Berlin. Don’t miss the ‘Leweb’ conference taking place in Paris in early December, which will bring together some of the most influential players in the Internet scene to focus on the key issues and opportunities in the web marketplace. The beautiful Lake Geneva will be the backdrop for the ‘Lift’ conference in February 2012, which will explore the social implications of new digital technologies with a focus on Europe and Asia.

Some claim that the era of Medicine 2.0 is approaching its ‘fall’. Among these is, Arun Keeppanasseril also one of the speakers at the Medicine 2.0 conference in Stanford. Arun compiled a “wish list” for the future wave of Medicine 3.0, in a similar way to what Eysenbach did for Medicine 2.0.  Among the essential features of Medicine 3.0 that we can gather from his abstract are context-based web tools that will allow more targeted knowledge processing and retrieval.

As put by Arun: “Web 3.0 promises to be a more mature web where better ‘pathways’ for information retrieval will be created, and a greater capacity for cognitive processing of information will be built. The immense amount of information, the complex social dynamics and the increasingly sophisticated health care expectations and goals cry out for a mechanism to initiate contextual knowledge processing and retrieval.”

We are curious to see which mechanisms will be the building blocks for Medicine 3.0. If the wish list becomes indeed fulfilled, it may be the case that the 2011 Medicine 2.0 conference in Stanford will be the last one bearing this name, and we will see instead a ‘Medicine 3.0’ conference next year!

Stephen Dunn

This is backed up by a new study published by the Mayo Clinic. The study shows that social media can help researchers find patients with rare diseases who are candidates for clinical trials more quickly than conventional methods of recruitment.

Through patient-run websites dedicated to heart conditions and women’s heart health, a team of cardiologists led by Sharonne Hayes, M.D., is reaching out to survivors of spontaneous coronary artery dissection, also known as SCAD, a poorly understood heart condition that affects just a few thousand Americans every year.

Study recruitment through social media and online networks could help researchers assemble large and demographically diverse patient groups more quickly and inexpensively than they can using traditional outreach methods, according to the study, set for publication in the September issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

“Patients with rare diseases tend to find one another and connect because they are searching for information and support,” says co-author Marysia Tweet, M.D. “Studies of rare diseases often are underfunded, and people with these conditions are quite motivated.”

A SCAD survivor inspired the pilot study. The woman approached Dr. Hayes asking how she could spur more research into the unusual condition. Dr. Hayes’ research team then asked the survivor to help recruit participants through an online support community on the website for WomenHeart: The National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease, the SCAD survivor and Dr. Hayes already were affiliated with the site. ”This is a completely different research model than Mayo Clinic is used to,” Dr. Hayes says. “Investigators here typically rely on the stores of patient information from the clinic. This was truly patient-initiated research.”

The study landed 18 participants in less than a week, six more than could participate in this pilot of 12 patients. The remaining volunteers are eligible to participate in a new, larger study based on the initial study’s success.

The new research seeks patients through conventional and social media outlets and aims to build a virtual registry and DNA biobank of up to 400 SCAD survivors and their relatives. The database will help physicians conduct more detailed analyses of treatment strategies and factors that affect prognosis and better understand the possible genetic basis of some SCAD cases.

“Patient leadership in this is huge,” says study co-author Lee Aase, director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media. “Designing research protocols to study rare diseases and then recruiting enough patients to participate is extremely difficult for busy physicians, but patients with rare diseases are highly motivated to see research happen.”

The study clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of social media campaigns but it is important to remember that the starting point should begin with an understanding of the e-patient target, where to find them and how to best engage them. It is also important to track all efforts to ensure efficiency, and develop an action plan to address questions and concerns that may arise. Become part of their community, show support and offer insights when appropriate and provide a valuable service and offer a clinical trial opportunity they may not have discovered otherwise. Online health communities offer up a glimpse into the e-Patient’s world. Show sensitivity and respect, and in return the information and opportunities provided to e-Patients will be welcomed.

Bertalan Mesko, author of the award-winning medical blog, ‘Science Roll’ and Hungarian most prominent social media physician, opened up the second day of congress, presenting an opinionated review of the most useful apps and online resources available to health care professionals. Let’s see some. When doctors need to perform a semantic search to find content that is relevant for them, one of the best applications available on the web is definitely Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha is not a simple search tool, but it is a computational knowledge engine that uses built-in knowledge manually curated by  experts to provide a specific answer to a query (not necessarily health related). In so doing , Wolfram Alpha  allows doctors to easily retrieve all kinds of medical data, from blood pressure and heart rate, to epidemiological data. Furthermore, it can also be used  to perform calculations such body mass index and serum levels, just to name two common examples.

While Wolfram Alpha helps Doctors 2.0 find answers to specific queries, other online tools are available to retrieve information. One of the difficulties when performing online searches, is  distinguishing between credible and less credible resources. One of the tools available for this task is Webicina, a free aggregator and curator of quality medical social media resources in 17 languages. Through the ‘PeRSSonalized Medicine’ tool, Webicina helps you pick the best medical blogs, podcasts, and  social media resources for each topic or disease you may be interested it. Webicina was founded by Mesko and the content is curated by him with the help of an advisory board that features key opinion leaders in health 2.0 (including Denis Silber), participatory healthcare and the e-patient movement. Webicina is also downloadable as an app.

Another way Doctors 2.0 are using social media is through crowdsourcing and collaboration, which takes place on platforms and communities. Crowdsourcing in health is particular useful as it allows the creation, through the joint effort of different expertise and experiences, of ‘surplus knowledge’ that can be vital in reaching a diagnosis for a complicated case. In the UK, the main example is doctors.net.uk but it is by no means the only one. A very interesting and innovative example that was presented at the congress is Medting, a web platform that allows physicians to share medical images and videos and build clinical cases online, by working on collaborative workspaces and maps mash ups, with the goal of reaching a diagnosis through crowdsourcing.

The just-launched VoxMed is another example of a social media platform that allows crowdsourcing for health care professionals, and it is unique insofar as it is targeted at health care professional in general: physicians, pharmacists, and nurses.

A different take on crowd sourcing, is the Research to Reality (R2R) platform, an online community targeted at researchers and practitioners. Developed and supported by the NCI, this community is both an information resource and a forum aimed at bridging the gap of translation between the bench and the bedside and at moving evidence-based programs into clinical practice.

As put by professor of surgery and public health researcher Atul Gawande in the commencement speech at Harvard Medical School this year, making health care work is an increasingly big challenge: “The complexities are overwhelming governments, economies, and societies around the world. We have every indication, however, that where people in medicine combine their talents and efforts to design organized service to patients and local communities, extraordinary change can result.” Crowdsourcing trough social media “local communities” like the ones presented above can be regarded as the most recent example of leveraging the power of team-work to improve healthcare.

Doctors and in general health care professionals have therefore a unique opportunity in front of them in terms of potentials of social media for healthcare betterment. Two are the main hindrances to the full exploitation of this potential that were highlighted at the wrap-up of the Doctors 2.0 congress. The former is the reluctance of doctors to engage in the sharing and creating of knowledge through open online communities. As provocatively put by some at the congress, “doctors may like innovation, but not change”. This reluctance to engage in open communities seems to be a characteristic of the professional category transversal to European nationalities. The latter is the absence of a common platform where health care professionals and patients can exchange and share information. Quite obviously, the former can also constitute an obstacle for the latter. On the one hand, solution to fill in the needed gap of a common platform for communication  across disciplines will be presented at the European Multidisciplinary Cancer Congress in September 2011. On the other hand, education may modify the engrained habit of doctors to discuss clinical matters only in closed community among their peers. One example is the first university course dedicated to Medicine and Web2.0, which will be presented this coming September at the Medicine 2.0 congress in Stanford. Finally, in order to fully exploit the potential of social media in e-health, guidelines for good practice need to be developed. A project called ‘Open Access Social Media Guide for Pharma’, was recently launched by Webicina, and a similar one will be launched in the near future for doctors. The projects aims to collaboratively create through crowdsourcing an open-access set of guidelines that pharma companies can then use for free and personalize according to their own needs and preferences. You can show your interest in actively participating in the project by sending an email to info@webicina.com. Welcome to the era of Participatory Medicine!

Skin Scan is a cool new app that could drastically reduce the cases in which people reach a medic when it’s too late and far more expensive by bringing a revolutionary screening method to potentially everyone’s home. Well, those with an iPhone.

This app uses a proprietary mathematical algorithm to calculate the fractal dimension of the mole and surrounding skin and to build a structural map that reveals the different growth patterns of the tissues involved. By processing this map, Skin Scan is able to see if the mole has an abnormal development and to alert the user if a medical visit is required. It is a skin cancer prevention tool that provides a risk assessment on the spot.

“Skin Scan is the easiest way to check your moles and their development. This idea, to analyse skin lesions by their fractal dimension, is excellent. I also used this application with my patients and the results are very encouraging.” Dermatologist Kostas Koutsioukis, member of the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD)

Based on specific mathematical algorithms, Skin Scan is a skin cancer prevention tool which tells users when to look for a professional medical investigation. Loosely speaking, Skin Scan is an automated classification tool for potentially dangerous moles.

If it’s accurate, it’s a great tool that can make a huge difference to early diagnosis and therefore improve outcomes in this nasty cancer. On the downside, lawsuits could emerge fast if the app tells someone a cancerous mole is benign.

You can get the app here

We gathered an eminent faculty European melanoma experts, including Prof Alexander Eggermont, Dr Caroline Robert, Prof John Haanen and Prof Reinhard Dummer to debate The changing landscape of melanoma therapies.

There has been a great deal of excitement in myeloma in recent months and we gathered a group of experts to debate recent data presented at both EHA and IMS the previous month. Here Prof Gareth Morgan discusses the role of maintenance therapy across the multiple myeloma (MM) disease spectrum with Prof Antonio Palumbo and Dr Paul Richardson. The group discusses the recently reported Intergroup Phase III Study (CALGB 100104) which demonstrated an overall survival benefit with lenalidomide as continuous therapy for patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma following autologous stem cell transplantation.

As prof Morgan stated, these recent advances is great news for patients.

You can see full coverage of EHA on ecancer here.

InMaps runs through all of your connections and detects the relationships between them, and groups them into different network clusters – which are pretty enlightening. LinkedIn separated my networks into eight clusters, including my social media contacts, work network, client network, previous employer network and contacts I’ve met through cycling. The colour-coded networks make it easier for you to see the depth and breadth of your connections in one interactive tool. You can check out mine here.

The visualization provides an insight into who the major connections, bridges and influencers are in your network; people with bigger dots and their names in larger fonts have more connections (and typically more sway) in specific clusters.

InMaps also includes a few options for sharing. It creates a landing page with your LinkedIn InMap (you can check mine out as an example) and provides Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn share buttons so you can spread your map to the rest of your network.

At first sight this might appear to be a gimmick, but understanding our business’s network, connections and influencers is already a major part of what we do each day to provide insights into our customers and how best to support, serve and engage with them; visualisation tools such as InMaps give us an intuitive platform to help us in this process.

The well-established and successful drugs imatinib (Glivec®) and trastuzumab (Herceptin®) were developed to treat subsets of patients, those carrying the Philadelphia chromosome translocation and those over-expressing the HER2 receptor respectively. It is therefore hardly surprising that oncology drugs and their development featured extensively in a recent, prestigious meeting in this area, Personalised Medicine and Diagnostics Europe, held in London on March 9 and 10.

Personalised Medicine and Diagnostics Europe was organised by the UK division of pharmaceutical events and information company eyeforpharma. During the two days, a total of 19 speakers drawn from industry, clinical research and regulatory affairs discussed many aspects of the development, registration and use of drugs for stratified patient populations and their associated diagnostic tests.

You can read the full ecancer review of this important meeting here

The latest equipment and technology will be employed at the centres to provide highly sophisticated radiotherapy treatment which can precisely target a range of tumours, while sparing healthy tissue to significantly reduce side-effects for patients.

Peterborough City Hospital’s state-of-the-art radiotherapy unit is patients on their treatment pathway today. The unit will be offering two hi-tech forms of radiotherapy – Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) and Image-Guided Radiation Therapy (IGRT) – as standard for patients who may benefit from the techniques. IMRT and IGRT can treat a range of cancer types and men with prostate cancer will be one of the groups who will be particularly suitable for these advanced treatments.

Jane Head, Peterborough City Hospital’s Head of Radiotherapy, said: “The opening of the radiotherapy unit is very exciting. As well as giving patients access to the most modern and effective radiotherapy techniques from day one, it will also be much more convenient for many people in the area. Before, patients had to make a long journey to Cambridge for treatment, which can be quite stressful and tiring, as treatment is usually needed every day for many weeks.”

The Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust has completed a new satellite radiotherapy centre in Bracknell. Radiotherapy staff are starting work in the new centre today to prepare for the first patients who will be treated later this month.

Dr Jane Barrett, the President of the Royal College of Radiologists, chair of the ESTRO National Organising Committee and a consultant at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, said: “Radiotherapy plays a vital part in treating a wide range of cancers and helps to cure around 40 per cent of patients. Techniques such as IMRT and IGRT can help to improve outcomes even further due to the highly accurate way treatment is delivered, with the added benefit of improving quality of life for patients thanks to fewer side effects.”

The Christie in Manchester is expanding its network of radiotherapy centres with the opening of a unit Salford this July. This follows the opening of a radiotherapy centre in Oldham in March last year. The new unit will have two linear accelerators (linacs) which can both deliver IMRT and IGRT. It will also be equipped to deliver stereotactic radiosurgery, a highly specialised neurosurgical technique for brain conditions – making it one of only a handful of such centres in the UK. Currently patients from Greater Manchester have to travel to Sheffield for this treatment.

Carl Rowbottom, Head of Radiotherapy Physics at the Christie, said: “Modern radiotherapy is incredibly sophisticated and can deliver very effective treatment for even the most complex tumour types, in terms of ensuring we target the tumour while avoiding healthy tissue.”

Professor Tim Maughan, Cancer Research UK’s Professor of Clinical Oncology at the Gray Institute for Radiation Oncology and Biology, welcomed the new services: “For a number of years, radiotherapy was the Cinderella service among cancer treatments. The focus was all around cancer drugs, despite the fact radiotherapy cures more people. It’s great news that investment in this effective form of treatment is regaining momentum. These new centres will bring enormous benefits to people with cancer across England.”

Elderly patients are currently under-treated in everyday clinical practice and under-represented in clinical trials. Both clinical and policy shifts were discussed to tackle this problem as well as myelodysplasia, anaemia, toxicities, co-morbidities and individualized management.

The inclusion of elderly patients in clinical trials is now one of the priorities of the European Union, represented by Beatrice Lucaroni, Head of the Health Directorate Medical Research Unit.

Lucaroni described various EU funded projects for delivering the best possible access of health care to the elderly, with over €750,000 funding, invested in projects such as the Consortium on Health and Aging Network of Cohorts in Europe and the united States (CHANCES). Lucaroni also talked about the PREDICT project, in which she is actively involved. Focusing on human development and ageing, it is aimed at shedding light on the situation of clinical trials in the elderly, and the unjustified criteria of exclusion of elderly patients from trials. Lucaroni also looked to the future, presenting a pilot innovation partnership on active and healthy ageing aimed at increasing the average number of healthy years by two, and made a plea for geriatricians from the audience to participate as experts and evaluators. “Ageing is the future of innovation, and Europe wants to be at the forefront”, she concluded.

Lucia Travado, Lisbon Hospital Centre, covered the psychosocial aspects of geriatric oncology, and presented data showing that psycho-social morbidities actually impact on the patient in several negative ways, by deteriorating quality of life, reducing compliance to treatment and efficacy too. As elderly patients are very heterogeneous, there is a need to tailor and assess each individual.

Some psychological treatments include, educational interventions and counselling, individual psychotherapy, and cognitive behavioural therapy. The issue of elderly patients complying with treatment, and the need to bring it to the fore was touched on by Giora Sharf, a chronic myeloid leukaemia survivor and head of the CML Advocates Network. Sharf showed very interesting data indicating that drug packaging affects compliance and worsens clinical outcome. For example, a recent study showed that more than 41% of patients were unable to open pills due to packages designed for child safety.

Sharf pointed out that though the compliance issue was only “scratched upon” in the meeting, it was the tip of the iceberg, being an issue that doctors need to discuss with caregivers and patients alike, as many do not understand the severe consequences of not taking the drug.

The awareness and sensitivity of the audience to this problem was raised during the two days of the forum, as shown by the interactive poll results. The number of attendees who would talk about compliance with their patient rose from 45% at the start of the meeting to 68% at the end. Other interesting shifts in perspective included over half the attendees, compared to an initial quarter, agreeing that the definition of elderly depends on biological not chronological age.

A consensus was also reached that cancer is not actively managed in the older patients and that stronger collaboration between haematologists and geriatricians is needed. The majority agreed that the best strategy to achieve this is the interdisciplinary management of patients from diagnosis to prognosis and follow up.

The meeting ran 18-20th March.

To view some of the topics covered and researchers involved click here:

http://www.ecancermedicalscience.com/tv/?play=842&cid=0&scid=0&q

Brandcast Health were the event organisers for this meeting.

The videos will be peer-reviewed and then published on ecancer as part of their coverage from this important medical congress.

As part of our Blood Cancer in the Elderly Campaign we filmed many of the steering committee members for the Rome meeting while in ASH; most were presenting important new data on treating the elderly. You can read Vanessa’s report on ecancer now and the video interviews will be available on ecancer from January.

Charlie, Kelly, Dan, Peter and Stuart made up the team onsite with support back in our London office from Dave and Jassett, editing the videos, Steve was busy tweeting and Vanessa did a fantastic job writing up many of the key sessions.

If you want to partcipate in the ASH Twitter Community dialogue then use #ash2010. You can follow our contribution at @brandcasthealth and @ecancer.

Finally, thanks to our supporters, it was great to be working with BMS, GSK, Janssen and Mundipharma who all had some very interesting dat presented this year which will translate to patient benefit very soon we hope.

Dan, Kelly and Peter are now heading to San Antio for the Breast Cancer Congress.  At least their loved one’s should be getting some good Christams pressie’s from the States for compensation for them being away so long.

You can read the full review on ecancer.

Brandcast will be running Europe’s largest ever educational meeting focussed on the elderly blood cancer patient in Rome, March 18-20 2011. 1000 delegates and an leading faculty of experts will gather for the inaugural Blood Cancer in The Elderly European Expert Forum: Ageing and co-morbidity in haematological oncology.