Lung Cancer

Administering pembrolizumab before EGFR TKIs may be inappropriate for TKI-naive patients with EGFR-mutant NSCLC.

Adding pembrolizumab to pemetrexed and carboplatin for advanced nonsquamous NSCLC is associated with improved overall survival at 24 months.

Alectinib was generally better tolerated and associated with better outcomes vs crizotinib in ALK mutation–positive non–small-cell lung cancer.

Pembrolizumab represents a new standard first-line treatment option for PD-L1–expressing advanced/metastatic NSCLC, according to KEYNOTE-042 investigators.

Combining the ALK inhibitor with this immunotherapeutic agent had an acceptable safety profile and yielded an ORR of 85.7%, South Korean investigators reported.

A simple blood draw to evaluate cfDNA might one day be used for early-stage lung cancer screening-if the mutational “noise” of normal aging can be addressed.

The addition of atezolizumab to chemotherapy was associated with superior PFS but did not improve preliminary OS.

Obese patients survived longer during immune checkpoint blockade for metastatic lung cancer compared with underweight patients and those who lost weight during treatment.

Pembrolizumab has shown activity against some lung cancer metastases in the brain, but responses can be discordant with extracranial tumor responses.

Activating oncogene mutations do not predict lung tumor responses to immune checkpoint blockade, ImmunoTarget investigators found.

An analysis of patient-reported outcomes showed that osimertinib yielded a longer time to deterioration compared with chemotherapy in patients with advanced non–small-cell lung cancer.

Alectinib offered significantly improved outcomes over standard chemotherapy in patients with ALK-positive non–small-cell lung cancer who had progressed on crizotinib therapy.

Neoadjuvant nivolumab combo proved safe while yielding high response rates in patients with NSCLC.

In KEYNOTE-189, a pembrolizumab/chemo combination yielded OS and PFS benefits in patients with advanced NSCLC.

At AACR 2018, Dr. Aung Naing of MD Anderson presented ECHO-203, the first data on epacadostat in combination with an anti–PD-L1 inhibitor.

Antibiotics administered within 30 days of starting immunotherapy reduced both PFS and OS for patients with advanced RCC and NSCLC.

In this review, we discuss recent clinical investigations that highlight the effects of novel compounds targeting EGFR, ALK, and other receptor oncogenes, as well as the promise of immunotherapy in lung cancer CNS disease.

The combination of nivolumab with an interleukin-15 agonist was well tolerated with no dose-limiting toxicities in patients with metastatic non–small-cell lung cancer.

Five-year results showed durable responses and long-term overall survival in a proportion of patients with pretreated advanced non–small-cell lung cancer who received nivolumab.

The kinase inhibitor fruquintinib offered improved outcomes vs placebo as a third- and fourth-line treatment in advanced non–small-cell lung cancer.

Substantial variation in treatment patterns can explain geographic differences in survival outcomes in patients with lung cancer, according to a UK study.

Maintenance therapy with pazopanib significantly prolonged progression-free survival in patients with extensive-disease small-cell lung cancer, but with toxicity.

Nivolumab offers extended overall survival benefit vs docetaxel in patients with advanced non–small-cell lung cancer, according to an analysis with 3 years of follow-up.

ASCO recently released a clinical practice guideline on the treatment of malignant pleural mesothelioma, including recommendations on diagnosis, staging, and treatment with chemotherapy, surgical cytoreduction, and radiation therapy.

The FDA has expanded the approval of afatinib (Gilotrif) to include the first-line treatment of metastatic non–small-cell lung cancer patients whose tumors have non-resistant EGFR mutations, including three newly identified substitution mutations.