Article and Video CATEGORIES
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center medical oncologist Dr. Greg Riely explains how testing for specific mutations in patients with advanced NSCLC can guide prognosis and treatment recommendations.
[ratingwidget post_id=0]
Please feel free to offer comments and raise questions in our Discussion Forums.
Transcript
When we’re evaluating a patient with lung cancer, the first question we start to ask is, what’s going on with this patient’s cancer? Where is the disease, so has it spread to other sites, and what does it look like under the microscope? So, what’s the tumor histology, is it an adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma. And then, importantly, molecular testing has become a critical part of our understanding of a patient with lung cancer.
Now, by doing molecular testing, we’re able to better refine the prognostic and predictive value of a variety of drugs and treatments that we have going forward, for designing an overall treatment plan for a patient. Some of the most common testing that should be done are EGFR and ALK — now, these are important because these both have FDA approved drugs that are indicated for abnormalities in EGFR and ALK. If you go beyond those two things, there are actually a long list of drugs that can target individual molecular aberrations and molecular abnormalities, but they’re uncommon, and we don’t have FDA approved drugs for those things, but I think if we go beyond those EGFR and ALK tests, we can learn a lot more and sometimes help patients a great deal.
Please feel free to offer comments and raise questions in our
discussion forums.
Forum Discussions
Thanks for the thoughtful response, I really appreciate that! All your points make sense. I will check back in later.
Please do check back in. It looks like I forgot to paste in links for that article. I'm going back to edit in the links.
Hi blp2020,
Welcome to Grace. I'm sorry you're having trouble. It would be very extremely rare to find a pancoast tumor in person your age. They are normally found in older...
Hi Sel87, Welcome to Grace. I'm so terribly sorry that your mother is going through this. I'm going to assume that there are no brain mets found, so let me know...
Sel87, thank you for reaching out to us. I hope that the link Janine sent to you was helpful. As you can imagine, many of the questions that we see here...
n3p, Hi and welcome to Grace. I'm sorry you have to check for new nodules. It does sound like your onc has good reason not to be alarmed that you have...