Dr. Phil Bonomi provides his views on the value of maintenance therapy for advanced non-small cell lung cancer and the various alternatives among maintenance therapies compared with a break from treatment.

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The first of several podcasts we'll be adding here from our ASCO 2012 Lung Cancer Highlights program, co-sponsored with LUNGevity Foundation, is with Dr. Mark Socinski, Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who discussed the updated results of continuation maintenance therapy with Alimta (pemetrexed) on the PARAMOUNT trial.

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).

Several weeks ago, my colleagues Dr. Tom Hensing from North Shore Health System in Chicago, affiliated with the University of Chicago, and Dr. David Jackman from Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, were kind enough to take the time to go over a series of cases in a webinar format. We reviewed the time line of several patients with advanced NSCLC, focusing on two central questions:

1) For various clinical situations, which molecular markers would you be inclined to recommend?