Lung Cancer

Everolimus (Afinitor) has received a positive recommendation from the EMA’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use as a treatment for patients with progressive, unresectable or metastatic, well-differentiated nonfunctional gastrointestinal or lung neuroendocrine tumors.

Treatment options for patients with squamous non–small cell lung cancer are expanding rapidly yet the field is still lagging in targeted therapies and curative strategies

Sangeetha Palakurthi, PhD, head of the Cancer Biology and Pharmacology Group at the Belfer Center for Applied Cancer Science, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, discusses a study that utilized non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patient-derived xenografts from patients on osimertinib (AZD9291) clinical trials to further refine therapeutic strategies.

Fred R. Hirsch, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and pathology, University of Colorado Cancer Center, CEO, International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), discusses necitumumab for first-line treatment of advanced squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Three currently available assays for PD-L1 expression exhibited a high degree of correlation in a comparative study involving archived lung cancer tissue.

Treatment with the novel multikinase inhibitor entrectinib achieved objective responses in 79% of patients with solid tumors associated with NTRK, ROS-1, or ALK rearrangements.

Nicola Normanno, MD, chief of the Cell Biology and Biotherapy Unit, INT-Fondazione Pascale, Naples, Italy, discusses the benefit of plasma genotyping to predict response to EGFR-targeted therapy in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Plasma-based genetic testing can effectively be used to determine whether a tissue biopsy is necessary for EGFR mutation analysis in patients with non–small cell lung cancer.

Efficacy and safety remained strong 2 years following treatment with nivolumab for patients with advanced, refractory, squamous non-small–cell lung cancer, with an indication that cytokine levels could predict long-term outcomes.

Plasma genotyping can, in most cases, identify T790M-positivity in non-small cell lung cancer, which gives patients the option of receiving the targeted therapy osimertinib without the need for a tumor biopsy, according Geoffrey R. Oxnard, MD.

The FDA has approved afatinib (Gilotrif) for the treatment of patients with advanced squamous cell non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) following progression on platinum-based chemotherapy.

The first analysis of a trial investigating durvalumab in combination with gefitinib (Iressa) showed encouraging anti-tumor activity and tolerability in patients with non–small cell lung cancer and EGFR mutations that were tyrosine-kinase inhibitor-naïve.