Lung Cancer

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.

The EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor osimertinib showed promising efficacy and manageable toxicity in patients with advanced NSCLC and CNS metastases.

Nearly two-thirds of older patients with stage III lung cancer do not receive any treatment, according to a new study.

An individual risk–based approach could identify more people eligible for lung cancer screening, and thus prevent more early deaths, compared with USPSTF criteria.

The combination of exosomal RNA and cell-free DNA improved the sensitivity of blood-based liquid biopsy for EGFR mutation detection in non–small-cell lung cancer compared with standard circulating tumor DNA.

The combination therapy increased the attraction of immune cells to fight non-small cell lung cancer and also boosted the response to immune checkpoint inhibitors.

In this slide show we highlight some of the top news on lung cancer in 2017, including FDA approvals, a new standard of care for ALK-positive lung cancer, increased risk with vitamin B supplements, and more.

Results from a recent study show that some differences exist in NSCLC gene expression from African Americans and European Americans, which could be leveraged to improve patient outcome in both populations.