Welcome to The Lung Cancer Sessions by the Video Journal of Oncology (VJOncology).
Daniel Tan (National Cancer Centre Singapore, Singapore) is joined by Melissa Johnson (Sarah Cannon Research Institute, TN) and Dean Fennell (University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, UK), who offer their perspectives on the most exciting announcements at the IASLC World Conference on Lung Cancer (WCLC) held in January 2021 and what research they think could change practice in the future.
The expert panel discuss the latest trial data on targeted therapies in lung cancer and mesothelioma, including KRAS G12C inhibitors, antibody-drug conjugates and anti-TIGIT antibodies. They also consider the use of biomarkers for evaluating immunotherapy response, the potential of neoadjuvant strategies, the importance of lung cancer screening and more!
KRAS G12C inhibitors & ADCs
“I think a very natural question is, how does this move into the frontline space? I think we do see that KRAS G12C, of course, is a new antigen that we know of, and so these patients do respond well to PD-1 inhibitors…I think a natural question is, could we find a chemotherapy-free option with immunotherapy and a direct KRAS G12C inhibitor in the frontline setting and exactly who are those patients? I think some of the co-mutation data may lead us to the right patient population.”
– Melissa Johnson
Mesothelioma advances
“I suspect the main use of immunotherapy is going to be in the population of patients who’ve already been treated, and we do know many patients can go on to have re-challenge with chemotherapy over the course of a year or two years, and this will clearly be an option for them…We may well see Phase III data emerging with chemo-immunotherapy combination, which perhaps would show very favorable data in the epithelioid subgroup, giving us further choices in that frontline setting. ”
– Dean Fennell
Checkpoint inhibition & biomarkers
“I think, despite all these interventions, there are still limitations in terms of how we’re going to better understand the micro-environment, how we’re going to understand the immune contexture in terms of allowing the appropriate cells to traffic in.”
– Daniel Tan
Neoadjuvant strategies
“I was struck as I listened to the LCMC3 presentation that this data certainly adds support and adds momentum to the excitement of neoadjuvant immunotherapy. It’s been a little bit of protracted story because it’s hard to … it’s a little bit harder to find and treat these patients before they have their surgery, but I think it absolutely supports the use of neoadjuvant immunotherapy.”
– Melissa Johnson
Adjuvants & lung cancer screening
“We can’t necessarily make those assumptions, that these non-smoking diagnosed tumors or cancers are necessarily going to behave or have the same biology as the screen detector cancers coming out of NLST or NELSON…I think that’s still a big question mark as to whether you would necessarily see the same mortality benefit, and I guess that’s really where we are now in terms of how we move forward with this.”
– Daniel Tan
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