2008 - a strange year in the world of oncology

Inspired by Paulo Nuin, I thought it would be a good idea for the last post of the year before the Christmas holidays to be a list; the good, the bad and the ugly.

Best of the best

FriendFeed’s Life Scientists Room

Best Purchase

HBA and SCIP Memberships

Worst Purchase

Buying a 2 GB flash drive and then picking up 2 free ones at ASCO a week later, doh!

Best New Technology

Discovering the Cloud - who needs desktop apps?

Best software

Evernote Premium Upgrade - it's a great web 2.0 database for storing snippets and clips of data

Worst Software

MS Office for Mac - it garbled scientific symbols in large files

Best blog/site

Discovering WordPress.org

Worst Blog/Site

Best left unsaid

Best Scientific Meeting

AACR

Worst Scientific Meeting

ASH - usually my favourite, but this year it got too big and too full of non-cancer topics

Best Cancer Data

Triple and quadruple induction therapy with Vel/Rev/Dex/Pred led to 100% response rates and survival not yet defined after 8 months.  Some patients were still in remission after 2 years.

Best Non-Cancer data by an oncology drug

Gleevec (imatinib) may be effective in Type I diabetes.

Worst Cancer Data

Any drug that fails is a disappointment, as are yet more 'me-too-not-very-effective' chemotherapies such as toiposomerase inhibitors.

Best new cancer drug in development

Abiraterone from Cougar Biotech

What categories would you have for your list?  Do tell.