Greetings and Welcome to the Spring 2020
AANS/CNS Section on Tumors Newsletter

Dear Colleagues,

We are living in unprecedented times as the ongoing global Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has caused a high rate of global fatalities and imposed tremendous stress on healthcare systems. The immediate priority of the Joint Section is to support its members needs as best as possible during this tremendously challenging time. As such, Rohan Ramakrishna has been working with Jason Sheehan and I to develop a manuscript summarizing strategies to manage neurosurgical oncology patients based on specific regional issues as it relates to the Coronavirus pandemic.

The social distancing and sheltering in place mandates resulting from the pandemic have led to the cancellation of all national academic meetings such as the April 2020 American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) annual meeting and now the October 2020 Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) annual meeting. Prior to this unfortunate cancellation, Frank Attenello and Melanie Hayden Gephardt had put together an outstanding scientific program for the 2020 AANS Annual Meeting and we are currently awaiting a plan from AANS regarding what portions of this content will be online. We are also working on rescheduling the 2020 Ronald L. Bittner Lecture which was to have been given by Susan Chang, director of the UCSF Division of Neuro-Oncology. Plans are currently underway for combining the 2020 and 2021 CNS meetings next year in Austin, Texas.

We have also made some efforts to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Section. The Section was founded in December of 1984 and was the first professional organization devoted to the study and treatment of brain tumors. The Section has since grown to over 2300 members. With the 35th anniversary of the founding of the Section having just passed, we are working with Jason Sheehan, our Secretary/Treasurer and editor of the Journal of Neuro-Oncology (see the full report), and the Springer publishing group to finalize a special issue commemorating this anniversary. We thank the many members of the Section’s Executive Committee who have contributed outstanding articles highlighting progress in key areas of central nervous system tumor research and patient care, and we look forward to the publication of that issue soon. We also heard from Mark Rosenblum, the first Chair of the Joint Section of Tumors, as the guest speaker, at a Young Neurosurgeons reception during the 2019 CNS meeting to commemorate the Section’s 35th Anniversary.

That CNS 2019 meeting in San Francisco was very productive for the Section, with an outstanding program organized by our Scientific Program Chairs Wally Sivakumar and Albert Kim, including sessions on complications in tumor surgery and emerging concepts in the management of brain metastases.

Outside of the context of the annual AANS and CNS annual meetings, education remains a priority for the Section as spearhead by Costas Hadjipanayis, and as evidenced by a very successful first ever CNS-sponsored course on Tumor Complications, which Costas co-directed on January 25-26, 2020 in Las Vegas, with several members of our Executive Committee presenting at that course.

The Section continues to support a robust annual research grant program. Thanks to the continued success of our biennial Tumor Satellite Symposium held before CNS annual meetings, most recently in Houston in the fall of 2018 and next in the fall of 2021, the Section expanded our support of NREF grants from three to four tumor-related grants effective with the 2020-2021 funding cycle. At the 2019 CNS meeting in San Francisco, the recipient of the 2018-2019 Section’s NREF Parsa Research Grant presented the results of their work, while the recipient of the 2019-2020 Parsa Grant will present their results at the combined 2020-21 CNS meeting in Austin. I’d like to thank Orin Bloch for all his work on the Parsa Research Grants to honor the legacy of Andy Parsa, who tragically passed away in 2015 shortly before he would have become Chair of the Section. We are also thrilled that the NREF Honor Your Mentor Fund created for Jim Rutka, chair of the neurosurgery department at University of Toronto and current editor of the Journal of Neurosurgery, grew enough to allow us to use the fund to support the award given to the best pediatric brain tumor abstract at the AANS and CNS meetings and name this award in honor of Dr. Rutka. This award newly named in honor of Dr. Rutka is part of our overall robust abstract awards program, led by Isabelle Germano (see full report). In terms of honorary awards, the Section, in partnership with SNO, has selected Amy Heimberger of MD Anderson as the winner of the 2020 Guha award which will be given at the 2020 SNO meeting in Austin, Texas. The winners of these awards and links to the award-winning abstracts have been incorporated into our highly informative Section website, which continues to be run at a high level by Jeff Weinberg, including developing a pilot for a platform that will enable providers to submit cases on our website for expert review.

Just as the treatment of CNS cancers is multidisciplinary in nature, so too should our Section strive to foster collaboration with our societies in other disciplnes related to CNS tumors. For years, we have done this with Society for Neuro-Oncology, and now I have asked Rohan Ramakrishna to serve a similar role in building our relationships with American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) and the Radiosurgery Society (RSS).

As has occurred with many academic organizations, the Tumor Section has seen a rise in people seeking to generate data via membership surveys. We’ve sought to formalize the process by which surveys are sent to our members and how data is collected from these through a committee (Rohan Ramakrishna, Jonathan Sherman and Chetan Bettegowda) that screens these surveys and makes suggested edits before they are sent to our members, ensuring that they generate the most robust data possible. A survey on frequency with which cases are referred for definitive resection after biopsy was launched through this committee by Costas Hadjipanayis and has since been published in the Journal of Neuro-Oncology (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31368054/?from_term=hadjipanayis+AND+2019&from_page=2&from_pos=3). Subsequent surveys on language mapping by George Samandouras, palliative care by Lola Chambless, and midline gliomas by Edjah Nduoum should make results available soon, including in an article that will be published in the Journal of Neuro-Oncology as part of the special issue devoted to the Section’s 35th anniversary.

Our international committee, led by Ric Komotar, continues to grow our partnerships outside the U.S. These efforts include expanding our international observership programs to enable neurosurgeons from developing countries to observe tumor surgeries at major American centers. Ric spearheaded this effort in Argentina through industry support, enabling Alexis Morell, the first awardee of the International Observership Program, to observe 250 brain tumor surgeries during a three month experience in the Brain Tumor Program of the University of Miami during the 2018-2019 academic year. Alexis summarized his experience in a presentation at the 2019 CNS annual meeting. The second recipient of this support, Franco Rubino, is currently in the middle of his observership which has transitioned from clinical to research due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

These are just some examples of the outstanding work being done by the members of our Executive Committee whose articles can be found throughout this newsletter. We look forward to resuming full Section activities once the Coronavirus pandemic subsides. The next time we convene, my term as Section Chair will have ended and Jason Sheehan will assume leadership as Section Chair, with Isabelle Germano becoming Secretary/Treasurer. It has been an honor serving as your Section Chair these past two years and I wish you all good health during these challenging times.

Sincerely,

Manish K. Aghi, MD, PhD, FAANS
Chair, Section on Tumors