Drs. Ben Solomon, Leora Horn, & Jack West review trial result and implications of ECOG 1505 trial that showed no benefit to addition of Avastin (bevacizumab) to adjuvant chemotherapy for early stage NSCLC.

The next live webinar to be done through the partnership of GRACE and LUNGevity Foundation will be on the timely subject of using molecular features of a resected non-small cell lung cancer in order to better understand the probability of the cancer recurring. This will be on November 14th, 7 PM Eastern/4 PM Pacific, and will hope to answer the question, "Could these molecular features improve upon current staging efforts to help us refine our recommendations of which patients should receive post-operative chemotherapy in order to reduce the chance of recurrence?"

The answer is, "Usually pretty early". I tell my patients that the risk is "front-loaded", meaning that we typically see recurrences occur in the first couple of years after curative therapy for lung cancer, if they're going to happen at all. That said, I haven't seen a lot of data that actually illustrates the point, but there was a presentation at ASCO this past year that addressed how well recurrences/disease-free survival predict overall survival after surgery for resectable NSCLC.

This is the first of a series of podcasts we've done, developed in partnership with LUNGevity Foundation, in which I present the same challenging cases in lung cancer management to a series of experts to learn the range of views offered by them, then the multiple thoughtful comments by all of them discussing the same single featured case for each podcast. The first discussants in each podcast will be Drs. Bob Doebele from University of Colorado and Jyoti Patel from Northwestern University, who are then followed by other terrific colleagues of mine:

The staging of lung cancer makes the distinction of whether there are any lymph nodes involved with cancer, and if so, whether they are within the lung that houses the primary cancer or outside of it; if the latter, a distinction is made among mid-chest nodes on the same side as the main tumor (N2), mid-chest nodes on the opposite side from the main tumor (N3), or above the collarbone (N3).

Here's an interview I did a few weeks before ASCO with Dr. Sarita Dubey, medical oncologist at the University of California at San Francisco. This podcast covers a discussion we had about her views on the role of chemotherapy for patients with resected or resectable early stage NSCLC.

Included below is a link to the audio mp3 version, a transcript, a pdf file of figures, and the video version of the podcast (with slides synchronized to the discussion).