Basic Cancer Info

Here's the podcast from the recent webinar by Dr. David Yankelevitz, Professor of Radiology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, on the subject of "Pulmonary Nodules: Evaluation and Management".

We've covered the potential value of systemic therapy for early stage NSCLC in a wide range of posts and podcasts, and to summarize what we've learned in a sentence, it's basically that chemotherapy can significantly increase progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) in patients who have undergone curative surgery for stage I-III NSCLC, but the benefit is far more convincing in patients with a high enough risk to justify the potential adverse effects of chemotherapy.

It's not uncommon for a question here to be about the a pathologist's terminology on a report that equivocates about whether a lesion is bronchioloalveolar carcinoma (BAC) or another form of adenocarcinoma, perhaps "well-differentiated adenocarcinoma", especially if it has a radiographic appearance of a hazy infiltrate or many small ground glass opacities.

Following the terrific presentations by Drs. Ben Solomon and Ross Camidge on the science and clinical experience with the novel ALK inhibitor XALKORI (crizotinib), we had a question and answer session, which is now available as a podcast. Here's the audio podcast and transcript for it (not really a video component for this one).

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drs-solomon-and-camidge-qa-on-alk-inhibition-transcript

The National Lung Screening Trial (NLST), a protocol with over 50,000 former or current smokers between ages 55 and 75, justifiably became a major news story when the results demonstrated a significant improvement in lung cancer-specific and all-cause mortality of 20% and 6.7%, respectively.

Almost two months ago, I wrote about stage IV NSCLC in the elderly. There, I reviewed existing data and focused on the published results of the French study (IFCT-050, aka Quoix study) that showed that elderly patients, just like younger patients, do better with platinum-doublet regimens in the first line than with one drug.

Continuing with Dr. Ross Camidge as our focus (see yesterday's post for a brief update from him on the afatinib/cetuximab trial), today let's turn to the recent webinar program he and Dr. Ben Solomon did with us on the subject of ALK Inhibition: From Biology to FDA-Approved Therapy for Advanced NSCLC". After Dr.

I met DC in April. He was 62 years old and was principal of a Montessori school. He had smoked a half pack a day for three years in college (which makes him a former/light smoker in my book) and was in fairly good health until the December before when he developed a cough. His cough didn't get better and thanks to all the talk about lung cancer screening, he requested a chest x-ray. The x-ray revealed a mass, which led to CT scanning.

Several weeks ago, we were fortunate enough to be joined by not one but two international stars in lung cancer research that is being translated directly from lab bench to bedside of the patient. I don't think there's a more clear and inspiring example of good science leading to effective therapy, albeit for a limited patient population, than the story of the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) inhibitor crizotinib (recently FDA approved and commercially launched as XALKORI) for patients with an EML4-ALK rearrangement (approximately 4% of the broader NSCLC population). Drs.