Biomarker-Driven Lung Cancer

Tony S.K. Mok, BMSc, MD, FRCPC, from the Prince of Wales Hospital Hong Kong, China, discusses how to improve the strategy of developing treatments for lung cancer.

The dependence of cancer cells on the continued activity of specific oncogenes for proliferation and survival can be explored for drug development.

Paul A. Bunn, Jr, MD, from the University of Colorado, discusses afatinib for patients with activating epidermal growth factor receptor mutation.

Carol Aghajanian, MD, from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the difficulties with a gold standard clinical trial endpoint in ovarian cancer.

David P. Carbone, MD, PhD, from the The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, discusses advances in the treatment of lung cancer.

Roy S. Herbst, MD, PhD, from the Yale Cancer Center, describes immunotherapy as one of the most exciting advances in cancer care.

Laurie Gaspar, MD, from the University of Colorado School of Medicine, discusses the potential of heat shock protein (HSP) inhibitors as radiation sensitizers.

Necitumumab plus chemotherapy as a first-line therapy for patients with metastatic squamous NSCLC demonstrated an improvement in OS vs chemotherapy alone.

Minetta Liu, MD, Breast Cancer Specialist, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, describes the CELLSEARCH® CTC Test, which allows for an assessment of patient prognosis.

David P. Carbone, MD, PhD, from the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses the exploration of immunotherapies as treatments for patients with advanced lung cancer.

Alice T. Shaw, MD, PhD, discusses the results of a trial looking at LDK378 for patients with ALK+ crizotinib-resistant non-small cell lung cancer.

Silvia Novello, MD, PhD, from the University of Turin, Italy, gives an overview of immunotherapy and the targeting of the MAGE-A3 protein in lung cancer.

Giorgio V. Scagliotti, MD, PhD, from the University of Turin, discusses recent advances in the molecular genotyping of patients with lung cancer.

Salvage therapy combining the novel Hsp90 inhibitor ganetespib with docetaxel significantly improved OS in some patients with NSCLC in the phase IIb/III GALAXY- 1 trial.

D. Ross Camidge, MD, PhD, discusses the potential to utilize crizotinib as a treatment for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer who harbor a ROS1 gene rearrange

Torsten O. Nielsen, MD, PhD, FRCPC, professor, pathology, University of British Columbia, discusses Ki67 in breast cancer.

A preliminary in vitro study has found markers that may predict response to drugs that target KRAS-mutated non-small cell lung cancer.

Two DNA demethylation biomarkers could potentially be used to more accurately determine response to epigenetic drugs for myelodysplastic syndromes.

Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD, the director of the Tumor Immunology Program Area at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses PD-1 and PD-L1 in various cancers.

Richard Finn, MD, from the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, UCLA, describes the development of cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) for the treatment of cancer.

Researchers at the NCI have developed the most comprehensive analysis of coding variants in the most frequently studied human tumor cell lines in cancer research.

The FDA has approved the pan-HER inhibitor afatinib (Gilotrif), along with a companion diagnostic, to treat patients with metastatic NSCLC who express specific types of EGFR mutations.

Suresh S. Ramalingam, MD, from the Winship Cancer Institute, discusses the investigation of the heat shock protein 90 inhibitor ganetespib as a treatment for patients with advanced lung cancer.

The next-generation PI3 kinase (PI3K) inhibitor GDC-0032 has shown signs of efficacy in patients with advanced cancers that were mutated for the PI3K alpha gene.

The second-generation TKI dacomitinib, designed to treat NSCLC, is being evaluated in a clinical trial that will measure the drug’s effectiveness as a first-line treatment.

Alice T. Shaw, MD, PhD, describes a trial comparing crizotinib and chemotherapy in patients with advanced ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer.

Roy S. Herbst, MD, PhD, comments on the emergence of immunotherapies for multiple types of cancer including MPDL3280A for non-small cell lung cancer.

Crizotinib demonstrated superiority to chemotherapy for the treatment of previously treated, advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with ALK rearrangement in a trial published online by The New England Journal of Medicine.

Although biomarkers have been shown to correlate with survival in prostate cancer, the use of biomarkers in the management of these patients may be dependent upon the clinical state and the class of drug evaluated.

Monica Fradkin, RN, BSN, MPH, OCN, Oncology Nursing Education Coordinator, Yale School of Nursing, Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, discusses treating patients with chemotherapy and biotherapy.