Frontier innovations for control of sarcomas

Orthopaedic Association specializing in other fields, and to enlighten the general public about bone and soft tissue oncology. With these purposes in mind, I hope to organize a functional and efficient academic meeting by summarizing the points for discussion. The Annual Musculoskeletal Tumor Meeting has been aimed at fostering close cooperation among orthopaedists, pathologists, and radiologists, and specialists in these disciplines have made valuable contributions through exchange of knowledge and opinions. While acknowledging the progress that has been made in the field of bone and soft tissue oncology during the last few decades through this mutual relationship, I anticipate that the coming meeting will provide an opportunity to clarify what is needed for the future development of our field. I also recognize that the coming meeting will be important for disseminating new knowledge regarding the surgical treatment of patients with bone and soft tissue tumors, because this is the task that falls to orthopaedic surgeons. I would also like to address issues such as palliative medicine, therapeutic approaches to psychosomatic medicine, and drug therapy for metastatic bone disease. The last 30 years or so have also seen advances in chemotherapy for bone and soft tissue tumors, and a variety of protocols have been introduced. However, no definitive chemotherapy has been established for bone and soft tissue tumors other than osteosarcoma, and spindle cell soft tissue sarcoma in particular. Meanwhile, in Europe and other countries, a new chemotherapeutic drug, trabectedin, was recently approved for the treatment of progressive soft tissue sarcomas [1]. A clinical trial of trabectedin was also conducted in Japan, but it failed to show any clear effectiveness for various bone and soft tissue tumors. Therefore, whether trabectedin is effective in this setting needs to be evaluated using many more cases. On the other hand, The 48th Annual Musculoskeletal Tumor Meeting of the Japanese Orthopaedic Association (hereafter, Annual Musculoskeletal Tumor Meeting) will be held July 9 and 10, 2015, in Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture, Japan. Since I currently serve as chief of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Kagawa University, my duty will be to oversee this meeting. As the Annual Musculoskeletal Tumor Meeting is one of the three major academic meetings held under the auspices of the Japanese Orthopaedic Association, managing this meeting is a great honor for both me and all the members of our orthopaedic surgery department here at Kagawa University, as well as the department’s alumni association. We are deeply grateful for the support of everyone involved from the Japanese Orthopaedic Association. As I have been consistently engaged in clinical medicine and basic research related to bone and soft tissue tumors, I have regularly participated in the Annual Musculoskeletal Tumor Meeting. On the basis of experience obtained thus far, I hope that I will be able to organize a meeting that will prove to be productive, beneficial, and truly meaningful for all participants. The purpose of the Annual Musculoskeletal Tumor Meeting is to introduce cutting-edge clinical medicine and basic research in the field of bone and soft tissue oncology, to provide holistic therapy through palliative medicine and nursing care, to establish collaborative relationships between orthopaedics and other related medical fields, to provide guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of bone and soft tissue tumors to the members of the Japanese