BTOG 2026 | EORTC Lung Cancer Group trials: PRIMALung, ICARUS-LUNG01 & NIVOTHYM

So the EORTC Lung Cancer Group is one of the biggest ones at the European Organization for the Research and Treatment of Cancer and indeed last year we had quite a few changes. We changed the board, so now the chair is Jordi Remon from France and the secretary is Liz Hendricks from the Netherlands, and I became the treasurer, the girl with the money. So we also have now, because we have a very active group with over 800 people and a third of them are young and early career investigators, which are a very dynamic force, we decided to create this young and early career investigator board of Coordinators. So we also have people for the communication, education, and also translational research. So in terms of the ongoing trials that we have, so currently we have the PRIMALung trial, which is an academic trial looking at patients with limited stage or extensive stage small cell lung cancer after induction treatment if they don’t have any brain metastases and they’re not progressing. They are randomized between prophylactic cranial irradiation versus brain MRI surveillance, and the objective here is to prove that brain MRI surveillance is non-inferior to PCI and it’s actually better in terms of quality of life and so on. The principal investigator of this trial is Corinne Faivre-Finn from Manchester, and there are a lot of UK sites open, so it’s a very important academic question that we have, and I hope that here in the UK people are motivated to include a lot of patients in this trial. Then we also have the ICARUS trial, which is in a palliative setting: patients receive chemoinmunotherapy and then they receive local ablative treatment, either radiotherapy and/or surgery, to all visible lesions, and then they’re randomized between cemiplimab, so continuing immunotherapy, versus stopping everything, and the objective here is to prove that continuing immunotherapy is better in terms of survival. So this trial isn’t going on; first of all, it’s not open in the UK, but it’s open in other European countries. Finally, we also have the BIORDON, which is an observational study in which we give radon detectors to patients in order to understand if this might be associated with the occurrence of non-small cell lung cancer with specific mutations or gene fusions. And this is also ongoing. But we have a lot of other trials in development, so that I cannot disclose because they’re still confidential, that are probably going to open up during 2026, so next year I’m sure that we will give more details. And then just to conclude, we have also um, we also presented the data from the NEOSTAR trial last year at ASCO, which is done with the EORTC, and we presented data for the cohort of patients with thymoma and thymic carcinoma, pre-treated with platinum-based chemo, and they received nivolumab and ipilimumab. Unfortunately, it was a negative trial because the PFS at six months was around 20%, way below the 40% that we thought. But still, it’s a very niche population; we don’t have many treatment options. So it was a very nice trial, and we have some patients; I have personally some patients that were controlled for a long, long time. So there might be a subset that might benefit from this immunotherapy. And lastly, we also published the different manuscripts of the Stage III Resectability Consensus by EORTC with a lot of other societies. So they have been published throughout 2025 in the Lung Cancer Journal, and the final consensus definition has just been accepted for publication in the last issue of the European Respiratory Medicine. So you’ll probably have the final manuscript very soon.

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