Enrolling Patients With Lung Cancer into Clinical Trials for Immunotherapy
Paul A. Bunn, Jr., MD, discusses subsets of patients with lung cancer that can benefit more from enrolling on clinical trials with immunotherapy compared with patients who do not benefit as much from immunotherapeutic approaches. Immunotherapy does not work in every patient, Bunn notes.
Paul A. Bunn, Jr., MD, Distinguished Professor, James Dudley Chair in Lung Cancer Research, Division of Medical Oncology, University of Colorado Denver, discusses subsets of patients with lung cancer that can benefit more from enrolling on clinical trials with immunotherapy compared with patients who do not benefit as much from immunotherapeutic approaches. Immunotherapy does not work in every patient, Bunn notes.
Patients who are never-smokers or who harbor a molecular driver, such asEGFR,ALK,ROS1, orTRK, will have a higher response rate with oral agents, such as tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs). The best approach to enrolling patients on clinical trials is to determine which patients have molecular drivers and exclude those patients from neoadjuvant immunotherapy trials since they are less likely to benefit from treatment. For these patients, there will be another treatment that could be more beneficial to them.
