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Here’s the first of a series of posts on key presentations on lung cancer from ASCO 2010, as reviewed by myself and Dr. Nate Pennell of our faculty here several weeks ago.
The first topic we covered was the very interesting if troubling Canadian BR.19 trial of post-operative Iressa (gefitinib) vs. placebo, as summarized by Dr. [...]
Here’s a podcast from the webinar presentation earlier this month by our beloved Dr. Weiss, covering the open question of whether we should consider giving an EGFR inhibitor like Tarceva (erlotinib) as an adjuvant (post-operative) therapy following potentially curative surgery for early stage NSCLC. It’s a setting in which there is a good rationale if [...]
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13 CommentsPerhaps the most unexpected clinical trial result in lung cancer over the past 5 years was the finding in the large Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG) 0023 trial that randomized several hundred patients to maintenance therapy with either the oral EGFR inhibitor Iressa (gefitinib) or a placebo after chemo/radiation concurrently and then consolidation taxotere (docetaxel). While [...]
0 CommentsWhat we are striving for in cancer care today is personalized medicine. So, if a patient with newly diagnosed NSCLC has an activating epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation, we give that patient Tarceva (erlotinib), a tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI). Right? Well, yes — but it doesn’t always work (the response rate is in the [...]
2 CommentsI would consider the recently published IPASS trial that compared Iressa (gefitinib) to standard chemo of carbo/taxol (paclitaxel) to be an extremely influential trial in lung cancer that has essentially ushered in a new era of molecularly-defined guidance of our treatment for many patients with advanced NSCLC, and we can expect that this is [...]
0 CommentsDr. Tony Mok, a friend who lives and works in Hong Kong and is an international leader in lung cancer, has just published not only the IPASS trial in the New England Journal of Medicine but also another trial called FAST-ACT (for First Line Asian Sequential Tarceva and Chemotherapy trial) in the Journal of Clinical [...]
0 CommentsThere has been quite a lot of discussion recently about the EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs), erlotinib (Tarceva) and gefitinib (Iressa). Recently however the final results of the FLEX trial were published in The Lancet, bringing attention back to one of the antibodies against EGFR, cetuximab (Erbitux). Dr. West [...]
0 CommentsA few weeks ago I described a blood test for predicting survival after getting an oral epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) inhibitor that is just becoming commercially available. This is called the Veristrat test and from company called Biodesix. As I noted previously, this technique looks at the protein patterns in a patient’s serum and reportedly [...]
3 CommentsAbout 18 months ago, I wrote a post about a new technique being developed that looks at the pattern of proteins in the blood of a patient in order to determine whether a patient is likely to do well or poorly after receiving an EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor like tarceva (erlotinib) or iressa (gefitinib) [...]
8 CommentsAlthough there has always been lattitude for individualizing treatment, I think developments in the last few years have added so many options that pretty much any standards we had from a few years ago have eroded. Particularly in a world in which the eligibility for avastin (bevacizumab) has is debatable (with growing experience of [...]
8 Comments