Dr. Karen Reckamp, City of Hope Cancer Center, provides her perspective on the likelihood that molecular oncology principles and targeted therapies will become more broadly applicable for patients with squamous and other lung cancer subtypes.

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Dr. Rosalyn Juergens, McMaster University, explains her approach to management of acquired resistance to targeted therapies in patients with a "driver mutation" and respond well initially to treatment.

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Dr. William Pao describes how the developers of MyCancerGenome.org envision the website resource being used to help cancer patients, both now and in the future.

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The question of how best to manage "acquired resistance" to a targeted therapy like an EGFR or ALK inhibitor in someone who has had a great response for a long time can be complicated and really doesn't have a best answer.  However, other doctors and many patients here and in the brick and mortar world ask me about how I approach it, and I've got some real opinions about it.  I'll qualify my further comments by saying that my own views have evolved over the years as we've gained more information as we get more clinical data and practical experience.

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.

Continuing with the webinar discussion I had with Dr. Pennell, here is a summary I did of a randomized phase II trial of the novel agent ARQ-197 combined with the EGFR inhibitor Tarceva (erlotinib): ==================================== Dr. West: We're going to shift gears and move into the metastatic setting, and this is a new agent called ARQ197 that is orally available,

It's been a while since there was anything to discuss about Zactima (vandetanib), an oral targeted therapy being investigated by AstraZeneca that has the potential to inhibit both the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), key targets of two important pathways in cancer treatment.

One of the most pressing issues in lung cancer research is in identifying patients who could benefit from a particular drug, both to increase their chances of having a good outcome and to spare everyone else from an ineffective drug with unnecessary toxicity. There have been some exciting advances in this field, but before I elaborate I want to give some (simplified) background on how drugs are traditionally developed. Classically, potential cancer drugs are tested on cancer cell lines in a Petri dish, and if the drug appears to kill the cells, it is then tested in animals.

About 18 months ago, I wrote a post about a new technique being developed that looks at the pattern of proteins in the blood of a patient in order to determine whether a patient is likely to do well or poorly after receiving an EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor like tarceva (erlotinib) or iressa (gefitinib) for advanced NSCLC.