Articles related to LUNG CANCER

Immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI)-refractory cancers are arguably one of the greatest unmet needs in oncology. In this randomized phase II substudy, patients ineligible for a biomarker-matched previously treated with ICI and platinum-based chemotherapy and progressive disease at least 84 days after initiation of ICI were randomly assigned to receive ramucirumab plus pembrolizumab (RP) or investigator’s choice standard of care (SOC: docetaxel/ramucirumab, docetaxel, gemcitabine, and pemetrexed). The study’s primary objective was to compare overall survival (OS). The median OS was 14.5 months for RP and 11.6 months for SOC. Docetaxel and ramucirumab were the most common SOC, received by 2/3 of patients. This randomized phase II trial demonstrated significantly improved OS with RP compared with SOC in patients with advanced NSCLC previously treated with ICI and chemotherapy.

This one-credit activity features an expert panel providing their perspectives on the latest trends and emerging research regarding biomarker testing and evidence-based biomarker-guided targeted therapy for patients with NSCLC with ROS1 and ALK rearrangements.

With a median follow-up of more than 2.5 years, sintilimab added to chemotherapy improved OS in patients with advanced, nonsquamous NSCLC. The median OS was 24.2 months with sintilimab and 16.8 months with chemotherapy alone. Nearly half of patients in the chemotherapy-only arm crossed over to receive sintilimab after disease progression. When the data were adjusted for the crossover effect, the OS benefit derived from sintilimab was more pronounced.

This comprehensive review highlights the history of discovering RAS and the decades of studies targeting KRAS-driven lung cancer, to the present applications. Although KRAS inhibitors have 36%–45% objective response rates with a median duration of response of 10 months, many tumors do not respond, and a variety of mechanisms of resistance have been observed, including new KRAS alterations, activation of alternate RTK pathway proteins, bypass pathways, and transcriptional remodeling. The authors conclude with a discussion of ongoing clinical trials aimed at overcoming resistance to KRAS inhibitors.

In this trial of nivolumab + chemotherapy vs. chemotherapy alone, nivolumab prolonged EFS by nearly 11 months and improved the pathologic complete response rate more than tenfold. There was also a trend toward improved OS with nivolumab. The study also reported an EFS improvement with nivolumab in both squamous and non-squamous NSCLC. Grade 3-4 treatment-related adverse events occurred in 34% of patients in the nivolumab arm and 37% of those in the chemotherapy-alone arm.

In an interim look at the SKYSCRAPER-01 study, investigators found tiragolumab plus atezolizumab didn’t meaningfully slow tumor progression compared to atezolizumab alone in patients with advanced, newly diagnosed non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Tiragolumab has now fallen short in two phase 3 lung cancer trials, having already missed its study objectives in advanced SCLC earlier this year.