"What happens when the next 10 patients you see require eight different drug combinations based on the mutations in their tumors?"

– Outgoing ASCO president George Sledge on the exponential increases in complexity required to tackle "chaotic" tumors with high mutational load

"We're very risk averse today. We look at one drug at a time. All of us believe that we're going to look at a combination of drugs in the future and get better results."

– John Mendelsohn, director of the MD Anderson Cancer Center, at ASCO 2011

"You have to start somewhere, and it's not too early for the patient with refractory disease sitting in front of you now."

– Jeff Trent, research director at Translational Genomics and the Van Andel Research Institute, on when new technologies are ready for a test drive in the clinic