Here's the final piece of the webinar with our own Dr. Jared Weiss on Highlights in Lung Cancer from 2011 -- the question and answer session that followed his presentation.  Below is the transcript, figures, and the audio and video versions of the podcast.

Apologies for the long wait since our own Dr. Weiss's upbeat and thoughtful review of the leading stories about lung cancer in 2011.  Dr. Weiss covered a lot of ground in his presentation that was followed by a Q&A session, so we've broken that up into several short pieces that cover a few highlights at a time.

Continued from part 1 Dr. West: You have a huge portion of your patients who have an EGFR mutation and we know that over time patients develop acquired resistance. So how do you approach the patients who have a great response initially, have a known EGFR mutation, and then you see that slipping away at slow progression? Do you continue the EGFR inhibitor? Do you add something to it? Do you change the dose? How do you approach that?

A few weeks ago, Dr. Lecia Sequist, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), joined us for a live webinar we did in partnership with LUNGevity Foundation. Dr.

We've already discussed prior work on Met as a potentially valuable target in NSCLC, as illustrated by work with ARQ-197 combined with the EGFR inhibitor Tarceva (erlotinib) has demonstrated encouraging early results.

Continuing with the webinar discussion I had with Dr. Pennell, here is a summary I did of a randomized phase II trial of the novel agent ARQ-197 combined with the EGFR inhibitor Tarceva (erlotinib): ==================================== Dr. West: We're going to shift gears and move into the metastatic setting, and this is a new agent called ARQ197 that is orally available,

Earlier this week, the Boston (Woburn, actually)-based company Arqule announced preliminary results from a trial of their investigational oral c-MET inhibitor ARQ 197 combined with the EGFR inhibitor Tarceva (erlotinib), which sent their stock soaring. Although I and other investigators dislike learning about potentially important cancer trial outcomes from the business news outlets, this was again following that pattern.

Tarceva and Iressa (some of you may remember this drugs from a few years ago) have certainly become popular drugs for treating lung cancer, specially in the adenocarcinoma type of lung cancer. Drs. Pennell and West have discussed tarceva in other posts on this website – how it works, who benefits the most, what is the impact of certain mutations on the effect of the drug. Unfortunately, we are also too well familiar with the fact that these drugs don’t work forever and the cancer relapses even after having initially responded well.

One of the most pressing issues in lung cancer research is in identifying patients who could benefit from a particular drug, both to increase their chances of having a good outcome and to spare everyone else from an ineffective drug with unnecessary toxicity. There have been some exciting advances in this field, but before I elaborate I want to give some (simplified) background on how drugs are traditionally developed. Classically, potential cancer drugs are tested on cancer cell lines in a Petri dish, and if the drug appears to kill the cells, it is then tested in animals.