Article and Video CATEGORIES

Cancer Journey

Search By

Vamsidhar Velcheti, MD, is a staff Physician of Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and staff physician in the Department of Hematology and Oncology at Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute. His specialty areas include lung cancer, mesothelioma, and thymic tumors and the use of novel immunotherapies for the treatment of lung cancer. Dr.

Lung Cancer Video Library - MET as a Target in Advanced NSCLC
Author
Vamsidhar Velcheti, MD, GRACE Faculty
MET as a Target in Advanced NSCLC Presented by Vamsidhar Velcheti, MD Hematology and Medical Oncology Cleveland Clinic Main Campus

Dr. Vamsidhar Velcheti, Thoracic Oncologist, Hematology and Medical Oncology, Cleveland Clinic, joined GRACE to discuss updates to our Lung Cancer Video Library. In this video, Dr. Velcheti discusses MET as a target in advanced non-small cell lung cancer.

 

TRANSCRIPT

So this is Vamsidhar Velcheti, I am a Thoracic Medical Oncologist at Cleveland Clinic and I am here to talk about MET in lung cancer. For the past couple of decades, we have investigated MET as a target for treatment in patients with lung cancer. MET is often upregulated or the protein expressional MET is increased in a lot of patients who have lung cancer. We have had multiple clinical trials and studies looking at various drugs that inhibit MET in lung cancer including Crizotinib. We know Crizotinib as an ALK inhibitor, but initially it was actually first developed as a MET inhibitor. There were other drugs including antibody-based treatments like MetMAb that targets MET. In those clinic trials, investigators have used protein expression or increased levels of the protein MET as a biomarker for response to these drugs. Unfortunately, all those trails were negative, and we did not see much benefit with using these drugs in patients who have increased protein expression of MET. However, some of those trails the challenge was to identify the right cutoffs of the protein expression and the biomarker related issues that actually lead to the failure of those trails. However, there are other mechanisms of upregulation of the MET pathway in lung cancer including MET amplifications and certain mutations in MET that activate the MET pathway like EXON 14 skipping mutations. When you have these genetic or genomic alterations in the RET gene, that activates the MET pathway. More recently we have seen some interesting data using Crizotinib which is a small molecule inhibitor of MET tyrosine kinase. Crizotinib has a very strong MET activity. Patients who have MET EXON 14 skipping mutations, Crizotinib appears to be a very actionable drug in those patients. However, we need more data in patients who have MET activating mutations and there are a lot of clinical trials which are currently ongoing including the NCI Match Trail that has an arm for patients who have a MET EXON 14 skipping mutation. So, I highly encourage patients who have a MET EXON 14 mutation to consider participating in some of these clinical trials to help our understanding of how those patients should be treated with targeted therapy targeting MET. There is a lot of promising new MET inhibitors in clinical development and hopefully we will see more positive news on that front.

 

 

 We would like to thank the following companies for their support of this program

 

                

 

 

                        

 

 
 

 

 


  

Video Language

Next Previous link

Previous PostNext Post

Related Content

Image
Watch the Webinar Now ON Demand
Video
The Foro de Pacientes de Terapias Dirigidas de Cáncer de Pulmón presentado el 9 de agosto de 2025 has now ended.   ¡Los vídeos están disponibles BAJO DEMANDA! Las versiones completas sin editar del Foro de Pacientes de Terapias Dirigidas de Cáncer de Pulmón de agosto de 2025 ya están disponibles BAJO DEMANDA. Estos temas se editarán y se ofrecerán en forma de vídeos más cortos en las próximas semanas.  
Image
2025 Spanish Targeted Therapy in Lung Cancer Patient Forum
Article
Da click aquí para más información y para registrarte ahora
Image
Clinical Trials Storytelling 2025
Article
GRACE is pleased to introduce three amazing individuals participating in the 2024-25 GRACE Clinical Trials Experiences Storytelling Program