WCLC 2016 | Studies on EGFR mutants in NSCLC

Hossein Borghaei, DO, MS of Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia, PA explains his talk which covered three separate abstracts on non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). One abstract discussed a signaling cascade downstream from the EGFR pathway; several signaling pathways where looked at and showed that certain key pathways can be blocked by tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs), which produced interesting results in terms of tumor suppression. The second abstract looked at rare EGFR mutations, in particular exon 20; genetic profiling of different tumors was performed and showed that there are multiple different exon 20 mutations. Using PDX mouse models and animal experiments, this study then showed that a combination of two separate EGFR pathway inhibitors, an antibody and TKI, was effective in suppressing tumor growth. There are questions as to whether these types of combinations cause side effects. The third study involved genome wide association (GWA) studies looking for different HLA haplotypes, which identified a particular HLA associated with the EFGR mutation, explaining the higher prevalence of EGFR mutation in NSCLC in Asian patient populations. Recorded at the 2016 World Conference of Lung Cancer (WCLC) of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) in Vienna, Austria.