One nagging question that people often ask about, or at least worry about, is whether they are compromising their ability to benefit from an EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) like Tarceva (erlotinib) or Iressa (gefitinib) if they need to cut down on the dose because of problems with side effects.

Despite the fact that many of the most anticipated ASCO abstracts are still being withheld until the meeting itself, there is certainly a lot of information in the released abstracts that provide a tantalizing preview and already hint at some important new conclusions. I'll try to provide some ongoing thoughts leading into the meeting coming up in two weeks.

Dr. Mark Socinski, international leader in the field of lung cancer, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, gave a terrific presentation on timing and selection of treatment after the first line setting for advanced NSCLC. In addition to the podcast of his presentation itself, here now is the question and answer session that followed it.

The Q&A portion includes slides with the questions as well as some slides that illustrate key points. Below, you'll find the audio and video versions of the podcast, the figures, and also the transcript of the program.

I'm very pleased to offer the podcast materials for the recent webinar by Dr. Mark Socinski, medical oncologist and leader of the excellent Thoracic Oncology Program at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill. He's been a long-time leader of the entire field of lung cancer for many years, and he's among the best at synthesizing new information into a cogent perspective.

Here is the audio and video versions of the podcast, along with the figures and transcript that go with the program.

[powerpress]

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.

The second podcast from Dr. Ramalingam's excellent webinar on Personalizing Treatment for First Line NSCLC is the question and answer session that followed it, which includes many questions about EGFR-based therapy, antiangiogenic agents, and other relevant issues for individualized treatments for patients.

I'm very pleased to offer the excellent podcast produced from the recent webinar by Dr. Suresh Ramalingam, a leader in the lung cancer field who heads the Thoracic Oncology Program at Emory University in Atlanta. He's also a good friend I've known since our fellowship training days, and he was kind and generous enough to refuse the honorarium we offered for his participation, instead requesting that it be donated back and used for other GRACE programs. Instead, he was happy to do this entirely out of a commitment to the lung cancer community.

Here is the first podcast of what we plan will be an ongoing series of round table discussions with cancer experts about real case scenarios and how we make decisions in practice. My guests for the discussion are Drs. Janessa Laskin, medical oncologist from British Columbia Cancer Agency in Vancouver, BC, and Alan Sandler, medical oncologist and Director of Hematology/Oncology at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

I just wanted to tell people about a remarkable patient I just saw who is delighted to have had a remarkable response to Tarceva a few years after responding to Iressa. She made my day. In truth, her case was remarkably long before this. She was diagnosed with bronchioloalveolar carcinoma (BAC) all the way back in 1995 (I was finishing med school, no kids -- life was simpler then). She had undergone a left lower lobectomy for localized disease initially, but her cancer recurred in late 1998, confirmed on a bronchoscopy, and she began experiencing a cough then.