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Announcer Intro
You’re listening to Project Oncology on ReachMD.  On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Munir Ghesani, who’s a Chief Medical Officer and the Medical Director at United Theranostics in Princeton, New Jersey.  He’s also the Immediate Past-President of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, otherwise known as SNMMI. Today, he’ll be giving us a pre-conference perspective on what to expect at this year’s SNMMI Annual Meeting and offer strategies for optimizing the conference experience. Let’s hear from him now.

Dr. Ghesani:
So overall, as any annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, we will have several parallel tracks.  These include the continuing medical education tracks, the posters, the oral scientific presentations, as well as opening plenary, as well as daily plenary sessions that highlight some of the key invited talks, including many award winners who will be giving their award presentations, which are pioneering work that somebody who is a visionary in the field has performed.  So typically, the day will start with about an hour and a half or so of the plenaries on Sunday and Monday, and the rest of the day on Sunday and Monday will be—as I mentioned, it will be the CME tracks.  And in between these sessions, there are also multiple other sessions where networking opportunities become available for young professionals, as well as those who are established, as well as the trainees.  And then there will be several satellite symposia, both in the middle of the day during the lunchtime, as well as in the evening where there will be parallel symposia and invited lectureships that will go on. 

Let’s say five, seven, 10 years ago—when most of the advancements we were seeing in our field were some new changes in the diagnostic techniques—now that we are increasingly involved in the therapeutic arena, that becomes a much bigger year-to-year growth in the new scientific data that comes in and that includes not only the broadening applications of existing and proven therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals but also using them in the earlier stage of the disease; for example, using them in a combination therapy, and a multitude of new therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals that are coming up on the horizon and some of the groundbreaking work of that gets presented at the SNMMI Annual Meeting.  So I’m particularly looking forward to new data for both existing therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals, as well as upcoming promising therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals. 

We have had the highest number of exhibits ever at this conference.  We were sold out of our exhibit space several months ago, and as a result, I can see that there will be some of the people who might in fact, change their attendance to virtual, and we are offering both tracks.  But my recommendations would be that if for some reason if you cannot attend the meeting in its entirety or if you have some obligations for some of the sessions, I highly recommend that you try to go to on-demand sessions and try to get at your own convenient time later on, go and listen to those sessions. That might be something that you would otherwise not do, and these are going to be multiple parallel sessions with the breadth of scientific data that are being presented. So I would recommend the audience to maximize their gain of knowledge by combining their live attendance, whether in person or virtual, but also taking advantage of on demand sessions. 

Announcer Close
That was Dr. Munir Ghesani giving us a sneak peek into SNMMI’s 2024 Annual Meeting.  To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Project Oncology on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge.  Thanks for listening!