Cancer 2034: Innovations That Are Shaping the Face of Cancer - Live from SXSW 2024

·45 min·2 clips

Barty says cell therapy access fails if the best innovation cannot reach rural America.

Aaron Strout frames the session at SXSW. He sets it up as part of Real Chemistry's live podcast series and points the audience toward a conversation about where cancer care has been and where it may go next. Emily Poe hosts the panel. She is joined by Wendy Barty, SVP and General Manager of U.S. Hematology and Oncology at Bristol-Myers Squibb, and May McCarmo, President and CEO at Tiger Lily Foundation, bringing industry and patient advocacy into the same room. The panel keeps coming back to trust. The guests contrast scientific progress with the patient experience of hearing a diagnosis, then having to sort out biomarker testing, subtypes, staging, and treatment choices almost immediately. Patient education matters here. They walk through outreach that uses social media, live activations, and patient influencers to make clinical trials and screening feel less abstract and less intimidating. The work has to meet people where they are. That means turning oncology language into something communities can recognize, understand, and act on, instead of leaving people to piece everything together alone. McCarmo offers a concrete example. She describes using GRWM-style videos and other community content to show what a trial visit can look like, then pairing that with broader education on breast cancer subtypes, testing, clinical trials, the importance of getting to screening early, pap smears, vaccines, and other basics that support earlier care. The reach was enormous. She says the campaign connected with over half a billion people, and the message extended beyond trials to pap smears, vaccines, and other basics that support earlier care. The diagnosis moment stays central. The conversation lingers on the bag of information patients are often handed, the turn toward Dr. Google or Facebook groups, and the fear that fills the gap before anyone has real answers. Patients should be inside the system. The panel argues for more people with lived cancer experience helping shape care, because the people receiving treatment know where the gaps and misunderstandings really are. Aaron Strout closes personally. He brings up his father's stage four colon cancer treatment and lands the episode on a plain point: innovation only matters if it also protects quality of life on the other side.

As heard by us

A live oncology panel that stays grounded in the clinic.

Cancer 2034 treats oncology as a field that keeps changing while the system struggles to keep up. Recorded live at SXSW in Austin, Texas, the panel looks at where cancer care has been and where it may head by 2034, with the human work of making sense of a diagnosis kept in view…

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See how cancer care, trust, and innovation meet in a live SXSW panel from Austin.

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