Rapidly Evolving Lung Cancer Treatment Landscape

Transcript:Mark A. Socinski, MD: This has been a great discussion. We’ve reviewed and discussed a lot of information on the latest treatment of lung cancer. To close, I’d like to get some final thoughts from each of the panelists. I’ll start with Mary Jo.

Mary Jo Fidler, MD: I thought this year at ASCO, lung cancer was a shining light compared with some other tumor types. I feel like we had so much exciting data, both with immunotherapy—and here I feel like in the lung cancer world we’re a little further along, excluding melanoma of course—but also with some of the second- and third-generation targeted agents. I think it’s an exciting time! I have always been an optimistic person, but I feel like there are reasons for patients to be more hopeful now.

Mark A. Socinski, MD: Really optimistic, particularly if you were going to ASCO in the early 1990s in lung cancer. So, Roy…

Roy S. Herbst, MD, PhD: Which I was…in those days we had chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery. Over the course of the last 20 years, we’ve added targeted therapy—realizing the limits of targeted therapy with resistance and only a small percentage of patients benefitting—and now we have immunotherapy. So we’ve added two new modalities. Now the challenge for all of us is how to integrate them all together in both the curative and the palliative settings. I think we’re seeing that that’s happening.

Mark A. Socinski, MD: Geoff?

Geoffrey R. Oxnard, MD: With every one of my patients, I talk about modalities; chemotherapy, targeted therapy, immune therapy. That’s such a neat evolution. I’m not sure that happens in every doctor’s office and that needs to be so. Every oncologist needs to have a piece of that optimism, because patients trickle in to me not having heard this stuff—so we need to make sure everyone knows about that and gets a piece of what’s happening.

Mark A. Socinski, MD: And, Naiyer, final thoughts.

Naiyer Rizvi, MD: I think you need a Sunday morning talk show because you’re so good at this. PD-L1 and PD-1 inhibitors are, kind of, the new cisplatin. They are like the new backbone that we’re going to build combinations and strategies on to for the rest of our careers. I think we’re going to be pushing the plateau up.

Transcript Edited for Clarity

Mark A. Socinski, MD: Well, on behalf of our panel, we thank you for joining us and we hope you found this Peer Exchange informative. Thank you.