Metastatic NSCLC: Unmet Needs and Future Directions in Care
Closing out his discussion on the management of advanced non–small cell lung cancer, an expert oncologist provides his hopes for future evolutions in the treatment paradigm.
Transcript:
Jason Porter, MD: One great area of unmet need for these patients is in the second-line space. Recently, ramucirumab and pembrolizumab as a second-line treatment option was shown to be efficacious for patients who progressed on pembrolizumab. In this space, it’s very important to know the patient’s genomic background of their tumor, including whether they have actionable alterations in the second-line space, such as KRAS-G12C, where we have effective treatment options for those patients.
In the first-line space, also recently approved were durvalumab and tremelimumab, along with platinum doublet chemotherapy, according to the POSEIDON trial. This is another exciting addition to our first-line treatment options for these patients.
But there remains an unmet need, including biomarker-targeted therapies for patients who have squamous cell carcinoma. Only about 5% of patients with squamous cell carcinoma will have EGFR expression, mostly in Asian populations. There’s a great unmet need for patients who have squamous cell histology where it relates to targeted therapies.
In the future, this is going to continue to be a problem, but I believe we’ll develop biomarkers that we can use in actionable alterations in squamous cell carcinoma, with effective therapies, in the coming years. We were in a situation with adrenal carcinoma just a decade ago, and we’ve seen the development of many targeted agents. I’m hopeful that with squamous cell histology, we’ll see a similar development of agents that target oncogenes in this disease.
Transcript edited for clarity.
