Esteemed Featured Lectures Headline SSO 2025

SSO Presidential Address
Friday, March 28, 2025
11:25 - 11:55 a.m.

Ronald P. DeMatteo, MD

James Ewing Lecture
Thursday, March 27, 2025
7:45 - 8:15 a.m.

Genetic Testing in Cancer Patients: Which Patients? Which Genes?
Susan M. Domchek, MD, FASCO
Dr. Domchek is the Basser Professor in Oncology at the University of Pennsylvania, executive director of the Basser Center for BRCA at the Abramson Cancer Center, and director of the Mariann and Robert MacDonald Cancer Risk Evaluation Program. A medical oncologist, Dr. Domchek’s research focuses on improving the genetic evaluation and medical management of individuals with inherited risk factors for cancer. She is particularly interested in developing cancer interception strategies, including the possibility of immune-interception, for those with a genetic susceptibility. In her seminal work, Dr. Domchek demonstrated that risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy is associated with improved survival in BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers. She has been critical to the development of PARP inhibitors in BRCA associated cancers. Her work has also addressed the real-world complexity of the clinical application of germline genetics, particularly with multigene panel testing. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Society of Clinical Investigation, and has authored/co-authored more than 450 articles appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, and the Journal of Clinical Oncology among others.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Lecture
Thursday, March 27, 2025
1:15 - 1:45 p.m.

John H. Stewart IV, MD, MBA, FACS

John Wayne Clinical Research Lecture
Friday, March 28, 2025
10:25 - 10:55 a.m.

Pancreatic Cancer: Survivors to Solutions
Vinod Balachandran, MD, FACS

Surgeon-scientist Vinod Balachandran completed his undergraduate degree in Physics at Cornell University, medical degree at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, general surgery residency at Weill Cornell’s New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and complex surgical oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). In 2015, he joined MSK as faculty, where he is an attending hepatopancreatobiliary surgeon, laboratory head in the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program, and Director of The Olayan Center for Cancer Vaccines, an academic biohub focused on catalyzing next-generation precision cancer vaccines.

Vinod’s lab has discovered promising new immunotherapies for pancreatic cancer, a common, deadly cancer with no effective treatments. In 2017, his group observed that rare long-term survivors of pancreatic cancer have immune-activated tumors enriched in T cells that recognize neoantigens – immunogenic byproducts of mutations in cancer cells. As pancreatic cancer was historically considered immunologically inert, this evidence of natural T cell immunity spurred efforts to understand and therapeutically phenocopy the “long-term survivor state”. To recreate this state, his team led a landmark clinical trial of personalized RNA neoantigen vaccines in pancreatic cancer that demonstrated precision vaccines trigger potent, durable immunity that correlates with delayed cancer recurrence. This discovery that vaccines targeting ubiquitous byproducts of cancer may impact outcome in one of the most challenging cancers has ignited global efforts to extend principles of successful vaccination in pancreatic cancer to other high-need cancers.

Vinod has received several honors for his work, including the 2023 Trailblazer Prize for Clinician-Scientists from the Foundation for the NIH.