Our tendency in oncology is that once we find a new active drug in cancer, we try to add it to our current standard treatment approach and see if we can do better than what our current standard achieves. More is better. And we knew that the epidermal growth factor receptor inhibitors Iressa and Tarceva could lead to significant shrinkage of some lung cancers. So the lung cancer community was relatively optimistic about the clinical trials that compared chemo alone to the same chemo with Iressa or Tarceva.

So far, I've only written a few introductory posts on mesothelioma, but there were some interesting presentations at ASCO 2007 about the topic. One described the results of an expanded access protocol (EAP), which is when a company gives free access to a drug that is not yet commercially available (generally in exchange for participation in a data-collection study).

Over the past few years, sex-based differences in lung cancer have become increasingly recognized as relevant in prognosis overall and potentially in predicting response to treatment, such as EGFR inhibitors and other targeted therapies. At ASCO 2007, a group led by Dr.

I wrote in a post several months ago about the ongoing study of the monoclonal entibody against EGFR erbitux (cetuximab) in lung cancer, where it's role is still up in the air. Unlike the EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) iressa and tarceva, which showed no benefit when given concurrently with standard chemo, erbitux has a different mechanism and may still be useful when given along with chemo.

It's a little sad that you can get more cancer information from the business websites than from the medical ones, but if you checked a story on Forbes.com today you learned that Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) provided a press release that one of their important Erbitux (cetuximab) trials didn't meet its primary endpoint of improved progression-free

The study I was just discussing, the French trial of Iressa at 250 mg daily for advanced BAC (abstract here), provided interesting clinical information, especially when viewed in the context of previous work on EGFR inhibitors in BAC.

I reviewed a couple of presentations on bronchioloalveolar carcinoma (BAC) at ASCO 2007, including one by Cadranal and colleagues in which patients with advanced BAC received single agent Iressa (abstract here).

One of the central ideas in management of advanced NSCLC is that many two-drug chemo combinations have been compared and show essentially superimposable results, as I described in a prior post.

As described in one of my first posts, Avastin was approved by the US FDA for the first line treatment of advanced NSCLC in patients with non-squamous cancers, no history of coughing up blood, and no brain metastases, based on the positive trial ECOG 4599 (abstract here) that demonstrated a survival benefit for carbo/taxol/a

I had previously mentioned in prior posts that there have been a few studies in advanced NSCLC that indicate that about 4 cycles provides as much treatment benefit as continuing first-line chemo until progression. I also noted that the ECOG 4599 trial (abstract here) gave up to 6 cycles of chemo (with carbo/taxol) and avastin, followed by avastin alone as a maintenance therapy until progression of the cancer.