Dr. Karen Kelly of the University of California, Davis, provides her view on the targeted therapy approaches most likely to become clinically useful in lung cancer over the next several years.

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Dr. Phil Bonomi, from Rush University, provides his view on the targeted therapy approaches most likely to become clinically useful in lung cancer over the next several years.

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Dr. Oxnard from Dana Farber Cancer Institute provides his insight on which patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer he pursues molecular testing for, and which molecular markers are the highest priority.

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Dr. Leighl, lung cancer expert from Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, continued her summary of the leading highlights in lung cancer from 2012 with coverage of new information on XALKORI for patients with either an ALK rearrangement or the newly identified ROS-1 rearrangement.  

Dr. Greg Riely, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, provides his view on the targeted therapy approaches most likely to become clinically useful in lung cancer over the next several years.

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Here's a video I just did in response to my recent spate of molecular marker studies I've sent in the last 4-6 weeks that have come back with quite a few positive results for an EGFR mutation or ALK rearrangement, as well as one patient positive for a ROS1 rearrangement.  For each of these patients, the results have had a major impact in the opportunity for them to receive an oral therapy with a high probability of response, and in a few cases, we've already seen a significant improvement.

Folks here know that just about every day we discuss questions of what molecular marker test to order for lung cancer, how important it is, how it's done, what tissue is needed, and other very timely and practical issues in lung cancer.  These are questions that evolve every few months, as new research emerges with different markers.  

I'm just now returning from the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer's "12th Annual Targeted Therapies in Lung Cancer Conference", which consisted of about 170 very brief talks about several classes of agents, as I described in my last post.  Some of these are likely to emerge as viable, truly beneficial therapies for patients; many others will fall by the wayside.

After the last several posts have discussed our friend and lung cancer expert Dr. Ross Camidge, we'll turn to the related topic of ROS mutations, which have been the subject of research by Dr. Ross Camidge (though apparently not named for him) and also researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital. This is a gene for a DNA repair protein, and the tyrosine kinase binding portion (the part that gets turned on to set off a cascade of downstream intracellular events) for ROS1 is very similar to that for ALK.