LUNG CANCER

Ravi Salgia, MD, professor and chair, Department of Medical Oncology & Therapeutics Research, associate director for clinical sciences, City of Hope, Durante, California, says there is a difference between precision medicine and personalized medicine.

Nivolumab demonstrated long-term survival benefit in heavily pretreated patients with advanced melanoma, renal cell carcinoma, and non–small cell lung cancer, according to an analysis of 5-year results from the CA209-003 trial. The analysis also identified favorable and adverse factors associated with survival that could inform future use of nivolumab. 

EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors have remained the frontline standard of care for patients with&nbsp;<em>EGFR-</em>positive non&ndash;small cell lung cancer. The most commonly used EGFR TKI in the frontline setting in the United States is&nbsp;osimertinib, Heather Wakelee, MD, said during a presentation at the 2019 International Lung Cnacer Congress.

Lung Cancer

Nivolumab in combination with a low dose of ipilimumab demonstrated an improvement in overall survival compared with chemotherapy in patients with newly diagnosed non&ndash;small cell lung cancer whose tumors have PD-L1 expression&nbsp;&ge;1%.

The results of the phase III PACIFIC trial made a significant impact on the treat&shy;ment landscape for locally advanced non&minus;small cell lung cancer when both the progression-free survival and overall survival results were announced separately.

The FDA has approved an update to the durvalumab label for patients with unresectable, stage III non&ndash;small cell lung cancer whose disease has not progressed following concurrent platinum-based chemoradiotherapy in order to include overall survival data from the phase III PACIFIC trial.<br /> &nbsp;

Charu Aggarwal, MD, MPH, the Leslye M. Heisler Assistant Professor for Lung Cancer Excellence at Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and other researchers conducted a prospective study using next-generation sequencing as a biomarker to predict response and progression-free survival rates in patients with non&ndash;small cell lung cancer &nbsp;receiving pembrolizumab monotherapy. The data were presented during the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting.

Advances in targeted therapies show encouraging activity as treatment for tough-to-target driver alterations in non&ndash;small cell lung cancer emerge, according to data presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting. The discovery of additional oncogenic drivers and promising targeted therapies means that certain patients will receive treatments that produce favorable outcomes based on their disease characteristics.

The combination of erlotinib and ramucirumab showed better progression-free survival in patients with newly diagnosed&nbsp;<em>EGFR</em>-mutant metastatic non&ndash;small cell lung cancer compared with erlotinib plus placebo, based on findings from the RELAY trial presented during the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting.&nbsp;

General Cancer