Dr. Kris on Personalizing Therapy in Lung Cancer

Mark G. Kris, MD, medical oncologist, William and Joy Ruane Chair in Thoracic Oncology, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses personalizing therapy in the treatment of patients with lung cancer.

With all the advances made in lung cancer in 2018, it is critical to consider every therapeutic option available for each specific disease subtype and each individual patient. Having a rigid standard of care for each line of treatment would be doing a disservice to the patient, Kris says. Instead, a more individualized treatment approach would be most effective for that patient.

Furthermore, there should be a multimodality approach at every decision point in treatment, he adds. Some patients progress on checkpoint inhibitors with oligometastatic disease that can be resected or ablated, instead of needing to move on to another line of chemotherapy. The same is true for patients with oncogene-driven disease who are treated with TKIs.