Drs. Leora Horn, Ben Solomon, & Jack West consider the merits of administering immune checkpoint inhibitors concurrently with standard first line chemotherapy or targeted therapy vs. sequential treatment.

Drs. Ben Solomon, Leora Horn, & Jack West consider whether immunotherapy might prove to be more problematic when given to a broader population of older and frail patients with advanced lung cancer.

Drs. Leora Horn, Ben Solomon, & Jack West review the potential rationale and possible limitations of combining different immuntherapy strategies with one another.

Drs. Leora Horn, Ben Solomon, & Jack West consider whether the data suggest that the better tested PD1 and PD-L1 inhibitors have differences in activity or tolerability or are essentially interchangeable.

As more immunotherapeutics become available to treat lung cancer, research must determine how to balance efficacy, toxicities, and cost. That means finding which patients who will benefit from which drugs while maintaining good quality of life.

[powerpress]

Novel immunotherapy agent atezolizumab (MPDL3280A) looks superior to Taxotere (docetaxel) in a study, specifically for patients with PD-L1. What are the implications of multiple agents with similar mechanisms of action in the same clinical settings?

[powerpress]

It's been a big week for immunotherapy for lung cancer. Right on the heels of a press release that the PD-1 inhibitor Opdivo (nivolumab) significantly improved survival for patients with advanced non-squamous NSCLC, my friend Dr. Garon from UCLA presented results at the American Association for Cancer Research conference with another PD-1 inhibitor, Keytruda (pembrolizumab).

Just last week, I ranked the development of immunotherapies as the leading development in lung cancer in 2013. I don't consider 2013 to be the clear turning point for immunotherapies in lung cancer: they have been the subject of interest and research for many years, and ASCO 2012 really marks their breakout from niche idea to more widespread credibility. But if 2012 was the real launchpad, 2013 saw the rocket really take off. The question is where is it really going?

There are a few interesting new stories coming out of the 2013 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) conference in Amsterdam that's just wrapping up today.  One has been on the  anti-PDL1 immunotherapy MPDL3280A, an agent from Roche that we saw some initial promising data on at ASCO 2013 earlier this year.  Dr.

Dr. Edward Garon, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, covers the provocative results of the novel immune checkpoint PD-L1 inhibitor MPDL3280A in advanced NSCLC.

[powerpress]