Benefit of Immunotherapy in SCLC Remains a Question

Gene G. Finley, MD, medical oncologists at Allegheny Clinic Medical Oncology of Allegheny Health Network, explains a questions lingering on the benefit of immunotherapy in patients with small call lung cancer.

Transcript:

0:08 | I think one of the things that's challenging in small cell lung cancer that doesn't seems to be in play in non small cell lung cancer is what the magnitude of benefit of immunotherapy in the setting is. And it's very modest in small cell lung cancer. And that's kind of unexpected for me. Because if you look at graphs of tumor mutation burden versus response small cell is always on the right side of the graph where there are high mutational and genomic changes in the cancer, and that usually correlates with robust immunotherapy response. That's where sort of melanoma hangs out and where lung cancers in smokers and bladder cancers hang out.

0:56 | Those those diseases have really tremendous changes in their response rates and in survival endpoints in a non small cell space and we're not seeing that so much in small cells. So I find that a little puzzling I'm not sure if we know a good mechanism for that.