Lung Cancer
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This past weekend, I had the unenviable task of debating my friend Dr. Nasser Hanna, from Indiana University and a highly respected leader in lung cancer, about maintenance therapy. He had been the expert discussant of the three key trials on maintenance therapy presented at ASCO this year (the JMEN trial of Alimta (pemetrexed) and [...]
6 CommentsWhen most oncologists think about the EGFR inhibitor tarceva (erlotinib), they think of the uncommon but very memorable patient who has a spectacular response within a few weeks of starting it, then continues to do well on it for a year or more. These patients are most commonly never-smokers, often Asian, and almost invariably [...]
1 CommentsI just recently wrote a post (here) that describes how I became convinced that under certain circumstances there could be a genuine value in determining whether a particular lung cancer patient has a tumor with an EGFR activating mutation. While these have seemed to predict that these patients are quite likely to respond with [...]
0 CommentsOne of the central ideas in medical oncology is that if you have two or more anticancer treatments that are active, you test them together to determine whether it’s safe and whether the combination works better than each individually. We’ve been doing this with chemotherapy combinations for decades, but it’s [...]
11 CommentsYesterday, as described in a press release, the FDA approved the regimen of cisplatin and alimta as a first line therapy for advanced NSCLC, based on the positive results from a trial called “JMDB” by the sponsor company (Eli Lilly). I described the highlights in a prior post, also recently published (abstract here). It compared cisplatin/gemcitabine to [...]
0 CommentsThere are two widely tested epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) — iressa (gefitinib) and tarceva (erlotinib). As discussed in my summary of their history (posts here and here), iressa was the first out of the gates, but it failed to demonstrate a significant survival benefit compared with [...]
0 CommentsAnother lung cancer trial that received a good deal of attention at the recent European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) conference in Stockholm this past week was conducted by the Spanish Lung Cancer Group and led by Dr. Rafael Rosell, who is chief of medical oncology at Catalan Institute of Oncology in Barcelona and [...]
0 CommentsOne of my earliest posts when I started OncTalk was on the use of oral inhibitors of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), one of the growth signals that is often over-active in cancer cells, against advanced bronchioloalveolar carcinoma (BAC), a unique subtype of lung cancer that tends to grow within the [...]
1 Comments I think one of the most important lead stories from ASCO 2008 got buried. Nobody’s really talking about it yet, but they should.
Amidst the results that led to an arguable role for erbitux and more compelling evidence to move second line chemo to bridge first and second line chemo together, we also received [...]
A couple of weeks ago I described in a prior post the design and general results of a trial coded as JMEN by the sponsor company, Eli Lilly. This study randomized patients to either maintenance/early second line alimta (pemetrexed) or a placebo after four cycles of initial platinum-based doublet chemo with a [...]
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