Promising new developments in Lung Cancer

Lung cancer has had a bad rap for many years but not every one who gets this disease has actually smoked.  It could just be to bad genes or random chance, for example.

For a very long time, much of the treatment choices consisted of chemotherapy regimens, which weren't very effective in most cases.

Then along came target therapies such as EGFR inhibitors, which were found to work particularly well in asian females with adenocarcinomas who were never smokers.  Eventually, it was found that the people who tended to respond best were those who had the EGFR mutated form not wild type.  Unfortunately though, about half of these patients develop resistance from the T790M mutation that evolves as a result of treatment.  

The good news is that there are now new agents in development that target this T790M - a decade after the original EGFR mutation was discovered.

Other patients with adenocarcinoma can also develop the anaplastic lymphoma kinase translocation, or ALK, for short.  Two drugs have been approved to treat this aberration and next generation ones are also being evaluated in clinical trials that may change the course of the disease by being more potent and effective upfront or after crizotinib fails because they can target brain metastases, one of the leading causes of resistance here.

We have heard much about checkpoint immunotherapies for advanced melanoma, but what about lung cancer?  The cool thing is that there are are indeed numerous checkpoint inhibitors being tested in this setting, and the first one, nivolumab was recently approved in squamous non-small cell lung cancer.  It has also been shown to work in non-squammous patients too.

At the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago earlier this month, there was a notable amount of new promising results emerging in the lung cancer space.

We interviewed a number of leading experts in this field to ask them what they thought of the developments and gathered their insights to offer better context on what the data really means.  

The result was Episode 3 of the increasingly popular Novel Targets Podcast, sponsored by Genentech...  

The Lung Cancer Show!

It covers the latest updates on EGFR T790M, ALK and checkpoint blockade - check it out - it's free to anyone to download and listen to on iTunes.