Dr. Leighl, lung cancer expert from Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, continued her summary of the leading highlights in lung cancer from 2012 with coverage of new information on XALKORI for patients with either an ALK rearrangement or the newly identified ROS-1 rearrangement.  

Following the terrific presentations by Drs. Ben Solomon and Ross Camidge on the science and clinical experience with the novel ALK inhibitor XALKORI (crizotinib), we had a question and answer session, which is now available as a podcast. Here's the audio podcast and transcript for it (not really a video component for this one).

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drs-solomon-and-camidge-qa-on-alk-inhibition-transcript

Several weeks ago, we were fortunate enough to be joined by not one but two international stars in lung cancer research that is being translated directly from lab bench to bedside of the patient. I don't think there's a more clear and inspiring example of good science leading to effective therapy, albeit for a limited patient population, than the story of the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) inhibitor crizotinib (recently FDA approved and commercially launched as XALKORI) for patients with an EML4-ALK rearrangement (approximately 4% of the broader NSCLC population). Drs.

The marker known as an anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) translocation has been all over the lung cancer news in recent weeks, most notably in the setting of being the marker in about 4% of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that is correlated with a high probability of response to the ALK inhibitor crizotinib, which was just approved by the FDA for patients whose tumors demonstrate this marker on a test in a central reference laboratory.

Here's the second talk from our recent webinar, partnering with LUNGevity Foundation to cover the ASCO Highlights in Lung Cancer, and this talk followed after

Plenary Session: Lung Cancer in Never Smokers

In a terrific podcast done a year ago about molecular markers in lung cancer and moving beyond a "one size fits all approach", Dr.

A new article just coming out in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology by our friend Dr. Ross Camidge and colleagues from the University of Colorado suggests that patients who have an ALK rearrangement appear to often have a particularly long progression-free survival (PFS) with Alimta (pemetrexed).

The Importance of Identifying Molecular Markers in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer To understand the importance of molecular markers in the current and future treatment of lung cancer, one should first understand how lung cancer was classified up until the beginning of this decade. Pathologists would look at a sample of a patient's lung tumor under a microscope, and then make a judgment of whether the cells represented small cell lung cancer (SCLC) or non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).