Dr. Jack West, Swedish Cancer Institute, identifies the platinum-based chemotherapy doublet as the backbone of first-line treatment for the majority of NSCLC patients.

Transcript

The most common subtype of lung cancer is known as non-small cell lung cancer which comprises about 87% or 88% of all of the lung cancers out there. One of the big challenges in managing lung cancer and non-small cell lung cancer specifically is that about half of patients are diagnosed at a time when they already have stage IV or metastatic disease. At that time, this is not a cancer that we can treat to cure it, but our goal is to prolong survival as much as possible and also to minimize the cancer-related symptoms, as well as the treatment-related side effects.

Over the last 10 to 15 years we’ve really clarified the best approach in terms of chemotherapy for the majority of people with advanced non-small cell lung cancer. Now, chemotherapy is the optimal approach for patients who do not have a so-called driver mutation, which is an uncommon mutation such as EGFR or ALK or ROS1 that you may hear about which are present in a minority of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer, but the majority of patients don’t have one of these driver mutations.

For that majority who don’t have a driver mutation, the optimal treatment approach is standard two-drug chemotherapy. This is specifically called a platinum-based doublet and it’s called that because the main component or the first component is a drug called cisplatin or carboplatin that has been studied for many years and is paired with another drug such as Taxol, also known as paclitaxel, or Taxotere, known as docetaxel as well, Gemzar, also known as gemcitabine, Alimta, also known as pemetrexed, or occasionally other agents.

These two-drug combinations have been compared in many trials and really shown to be essentially remarkably similar if not identical in efficacy. Because of that, we usually choose the treatment, the two-drug combination, to recommend based on issues such as convenience to the patient — some of them are every week administration, others are every three weeks; for some patients coming in a long distance, three-week treatment is much more convenient. Some have hair loss, some do not, and also some of these agents may be particularly a little more effective in some subtypes of non-small cell lung cancer — known as the particular histology, and others might be a better choice for a different histology.

We’re going to talk about that specific difference and which regimens we might exactly recommend for one subtype or another in other videos, but right now it’s important just to note that the mainstay of treatment for the patients who don’t have a driver mutation, in the first line setting, is a two-drug platinum-based combination — cisplatin or carboplatin, with a partner drug, and they really do seem to produce very comparable results.

We’ll talk about some potential specific differences in other videos.

Thanks.