It was a big day for the lung cancer world. After seeing the tantalizing promise of immunotherapy for lung cancer over the past 3 years, but outside of the range of routine clinical practice, the anti-PD1 antibody,  immune checkpoint inhibitor Opdivo (nivolumab) was approved by the FDA today for previously treated patients with advanced squamous NSCLC. This was just days after it was formally available for consideration and was based on the clear benefit demonstrated in the pivotal CHECKMATE 017 trial.

Over the past 10 years we've come to recognize that what is lumped together as "lung cancer" is actually a wide range of different cancers that behave in their own patterns and respond very differently to different treatments. Some of our greatest advances in the field have come from the recognition of the complex patterns, but it has also become more challenging to do trials for small groups that represent just 1 or 2% of the larger whole.