By Hisanaga Nomura, National Cancer Center Hospital East and Yoshikazu Tazaki, Asahikawa Medical University

The Japan Clinical Oncology and Pharmacology Society (JASPO) Annual meeting was held on March 24 to 25, 2019, at the Sapporo Convention Center under the direction of Yoshikazu Tazaki.

JASPO was established in 2012. The number of members exceeds 3,500 now, making it the largest oncology pharmacist’s society in Japan. In the 2017 Annual meeting, ISOPP Chairperson Alex Chan was invited and gave a special lecture. At the ISOPP Beijing Conference in 2018, the ISOPP-JASPO joint symposium was held, and JASPO became one of the academic societies closely related to ISOPP. 

Sapporo, the host city, is the fifth largest city in Japan, located in the northern part of Japan. It is famous for summer resorts and winter sports such as skiing in winter. Sapporo also has good food such as seafood and lactic acid products. 

We would like to share the following letter from Prof. Tazaki who served as JASPO 2019 symposium chair.

Banner of the JASPO Annual Meeting	Seafood platter at the JASPO Annual Meeting

Post-meeting Message from JASPO 2019 Meeting President

The 8th Annual Meeting President
Yoshikazu Tasaki

Professor & Director, Department of Hospital Pharmacy & Pharmacology
Asahikawa Medical University & University Hospital 

We were pleased to host the 2019 The 8th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Pharmaceutical Oncology (JASPO) in Sapporo, Hokkaido on March 23-24. The number of delegates in this meeting is growing year by year and continues to grow into a large academic meeting. This year, we attracted over 2,300 people. The theme of this year’s meeting was “Collaboration and Cooperation in Promoting Optimized Cancer Drug Therapy: Bringing Hope and Reassurance to Patients”. 

The distinguished and leading experts in the field presented state-of-the-art lectures. The special lectures on the future expectations for pharmacists: in the cancer medical policy making by Mr. Masahiro Sasaki (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare) and cancer genomic medicine by Prof. Hirotoshi Akita (Hokkaido University) were presented to start the meeting. Also, Dr. Nielka van Erp was invited as a guest speaker from Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. She presented an insight into ‘Pharmacological challenges and possibilities to optimize the treatment with oral targeted oncolytics’. 

The jam-packed conference featured engaging sessions covering diverse topics such as optimization of pharmacotherapy in childhood cancers and expanding roles of pharmacists in oncology field. Each session was filled with an eager audience followed by many intense discussions. There were over a hundred short oral presentations and three hundred poster presentations.

Poster Session at the JASPO Annual Meeting

In addition, the open public lecture about “Extending health life years by cancer prevention” by Dr. Shoichiro Tsugane from National Cancer Center, was held to promote better understanding of cancer from a variety of perspectives for both patients and their families.

During open public lecture, "Extending health life years by cancer prevention” by Dr. Shoichiro Tsugane from National Cancer Center

The meeting was very productive and ended successfully. We are sure that the delegates have all returned to their work with updated knowledge and information in the practice and science of cancer drug therapy.