2019 SPAEN Annual Conference

Once again, the community of patient advocates for sarcomas, GIST and desmoids have come together for another successful SPAEN Annual Conference from February 1-3, 2019. This year, Greece was the host country, currently establishing a Greek Sarcoma Group and hopefully a patient advocacy group. Dr. Vasilis Ramfidis welcomed all participants on behalf of the Greek expert community with great hospitality and warmth to Greece’s capital Athens.

The three conference days were full of learning about medical topics ranging from pathology to novel therapy options in GIST, sarcomas and desmoids, bone sarcomas and novel developments in radiotherapy and proton beam therapy, among a lot of others.

But also clinical trials and understanding them as well as Quality of Life were huge and widely discussed topics. Furthermore, capacity building about “Working with pharma”, “Data opportunities” or “Social Media” were important parts of the meeting. More to come in our conference report!

Also always worth to be part of such a community is the talk before and after sessions about similar or completely different problems, projects, good or bad experiences and brainstorming new ideas. 55 patient advocates, among them around 15 joining the SPAEN Conference for the first time, 20 experts as well as pharma representatives took this opportunity to talk, discuss and exchange ideas and experiences – a great way to learn from each other and to evolve the sarcoma community.