Lung Cancer

ALERT: The links for the podcasts are now fixed.

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.

The FLEX trial, a European study of cisplatin/Navelbine (vinorelbine) with or without the monoclonal antibody against EGFR Erbitux (cetuximab), was a technically positive study that was initially reported at ASCO 2008. However, showing an improvement in median survival of just 1.2 months, most oncologists came away feeling that the trial illustrated the difference between a statistically vs.

There's a problem in our discussions of standard treatment for patients with higher risk resected early stage NSCLC, and that is that there is a pretty clearly defined standard of care of giving typically around 4 cycles of cisplatin-based chemotherapy to reduce the risk of recurrence, but in truth, the majority of people in the real world don't get it. Still, I wouldn't want to imply that the problem is definitely that doctors aren't giving the right treatment to people who should definitely be getting it.

A publication by Drs. Oxnard and colleagues from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center just came out in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that should remind all of us of the pitfalls of taking very small changes in measurements too literally.

Here's the second talk from our recent webinar, partnering with LUNGevity Foundation to cover the ASCO Highlights in Lung Cancer, and this talk followed after

The question of "who should be tested?" for an epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation and potentially other molecular markers is among the most timely questions in lung cancer management today. The field has changed dramatically since the initial description of the mutation, associated with a high probability of an impressive and often prolonged response to EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) therapy, back in 2004.

Several weeks ago, we were fortunate enough to have Dr. Mary Pinder (alternately referred to as Pinder-Schenck) from the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa join as the first of two speakers reviewing highlights in thoracic oncology from ASCO. She covered several key presentations in small cell lung cancer, early stage non-small cell lung cancer, and mesothelioma. Here's the audio and video versions of the podcast, along with the transcript and figures (a zip file to decompress, since it was too big in unzipped form to upload) for this program:

[powerpress]

I've previously described the novel "pan-HER inhibitor" PF-299804 and even the randomized phase II trial of PF-299 vs.