Dr. David Spigel, Sarah Cannon Cancer Center, answers audience questions about squamous lung cancer.

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Dr. David Spigel, Sarah Cannon Cancer Center, outlines treatment options for squamous lung cancer.

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Squamous Lung Cancer, Part 3: Treatment Audio Podcast

Drs. Nate Pennell, Mary Pinder, and Jack West review the results presented at ASCO 2013 from the POINTBREAK trial of maintenance therapy with the ECOG 4599 regimen vs. carboplatin/Alimta (pemetrexed)/Avastin (bevacizumab) followed by Alimta/Avastin maint.

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Drs. Nate Pennell, Mary Pinder, and Jack West review the results presented at ASCO 2013 from the PRONOUNCE trial of the ECOG 4599 trial regimen compared with carboplatin/Alimta (pemetrexed) followed by maintenance Alimta. 

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Here's the second half of the presentation by Dr. Gerard Silvestri, expert pulmonologist and critical care specialist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, on pulmonary complications from lung cancer treatment.

One of the more eagerly awaited clinical trials in lung cancer this year is the PointBreak study that tried to identify whether an Alimta (pemetrexed)-based first line and maintenance chemo strategy is significantly superior to a well-established standard first line and maintenance therapy regimen.  Specifically, this trial randomized 939 chemo-naive patients wi

A group of investigators at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA recently published a very newsworthy article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that argues that patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who are over 65 don't appear to benefit from the addition of Avastin (bevacizumab) to standard chemotherapy with carboplatin/Taxol (paclitaxel).

I'm at Swedish Hospital, not in Stockholm, Sweden now, where the European Multidisciplinary Cancer Congress is going on. But there, the preliminary results of the AVAPERL phase III randomized trial were just reported, and they certainly look encouraging for the combination of Alimta (pemetrexed) and Avastin (bevacizumab) as a maintenance therapy for patients with Avastin-eligible advanced NSCLC who hadn't progressed after four cycles of cisplatin/Alimta/Avastin, compared with maintenance Avastin alone.

I apologize if it seems that the updates about ASCO have been slow in coming. This is mostly because the lung cancer program this year has most of the higher profile presentations occurring in the second half of the meeting, which we're just getting into. And, truth be told, this isn't going to be a blockbuster year for developments in lung cancer. But let's review what we've found out about thus far.

The historic standard for advanced NSCLC up until a few years ago was for patients to complete 4-6 cycles of platinum-based doublet chemo, and then for patients who were doing well and had responded or demonstrated stable disease to take a break from treatment and be followed until progression. At that point, many patients would re-initiate chemo or targeted therapy with an oral agent like Tarceva (erlotinib).