It's time for an annual favorite, the webinar by GRACE and LUNGevity Foundation focusing on highlights in lung cancer from the ASCO conference, the largest cancer meeting of the year.  

We're heading into the season where much of the biggest news in the cancer world for the year is about to be released, in press releases and full presentations at our annual conference of the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO).

Two weeks from now (March 9, 3 PM EST/noon PST), Dr. Lecia Sequist of Massachusetts General Hospital will lead a free online webinar that is a joint program between GRACE and LUNGevity, on the topic of "Acquired Resistance to Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors (TKIs): What We Know Now, and How We’re Moving Forward", to be followed by an interactive Q&A session.

Our practice in managing advanced NSCLC has been evolving rapidly as new studies emerge highlighting the importance of molecular markers in guiding treatment decisions and leave open questions about how to optimize the sequence of treatments from first line to second line, who to observe and who to recommend for maintenance therapy. And if maintenance therapy, what treatment to recommend?

Here's a podcast from the webinar presentation earlier this month by our beloved Dr. Weiss, covering the open question of whether we should consider giving an EGFR inhibitor like Tarceva (erlotinib) as an adjuvant (post-operative) therapy following potentially curative surgery for early stage NSCLC. It's a setting in which there is a good rationale if we extrapolate from the setting of metastatic NSCLC, at least for patients with an EGFR mutation, but we've made incorrect presumptions before when we extrapolate.

This is the first part of a case presentation I did with two great colleagues: Dr. Anne Tsao, who is a medical oncologist and lung cancer expert at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and Dr. Alex Farivar, who is a terrific thoracic surgeon at my own institution, Swedish Cancer Institute in Seattle.