EGFR+ Lung Cancer

The FDA approved several indications throughout the month of April 2018. A number of drugs were granted priority review and Fast Track designation. The FDA also halted all clinical trials using tazemetostat as treatment, and new initiatives were introduced to help ease the development of genetic and genomic-based tests. Check out our list of all FDA happenings from April 2018.

Based on data from the phase III KEYNOTE-189 trial, frontline pembrolizumab has been granted a priority review by the FDA for use in combination with standard chemotherapy for patients with metastatic nonsquamous non–small cell lung cancer, according to Merck, the manufacturer of the PD-1 inhibitor. 

The physician editor-in-chief of The Journal of Targeted Therapies in Cancer™, found 2 articles particularly interesting in this issue on therapeutic possibilities for patients with recurrent and metastatic epithelial cancers.. These articles show that combinatorial strategies harnessing conventional modalities such as radiation therapy (RT) and immune stimulatory approaches may have additional value for this population of patients.

When findings of larotrectinib, a pan-TRK inhibitor co-developed by Bayer and Loxo Oncology, that generated significant excitement for the treatment of both adult and pediatric patients with TRK fusion cancers, were presented during the 2017 ASCO Annual Meeting, the small molecule was lauded as a future standard of care for patients with advanced solid tumors harboring a TRK fusion.

This article provides a short historical overview of major lung cancer vaccination studies performed in the last decade to set the perspective on the development of current clinical trials of therapeutic cancer vaccines for patients with non–small cell lung cancer. 

According to results from an ongoing trial presented at the 2018 AACR Annual Meeting, adding atezolizumab to chemotherapy and an angiogenesis inhibitor led to significant improvement in progression-free survival for patients with untreated advanced nonsquamous non–small cell lung cancer.

Based on data from the phase I/II CheckMate-032 trial, nivolumab has been granted a priority review by the FDA for the treatment of patients with small cell lung cancer with disease progression following 2 or more lines of therapy, according to Bristol-Myers Squibb, the manufacturer of the PD-1 inhibitor.

Osimertinib (Tagrisso) has been approved by the FDA as a frontline treatment for patients with non-small cell lung cancer who have tumors harboring EGFR mutations (either exon 19 deletions or exon 21 L858R substitution mutations). This approval is based off results from a recent phase III study.

Benjamin J. Drapkin, MD, PhD, clinical fellow in medicine, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, resident, Massachusetts General Hospital, discusses the co-clinical trial of olaparib (Lynparza) and temozolomide (temodar) in small cell lung cancer (SCLC) patient-derived xenografts (PDX) models during the 2018 AACR Annual Meeting.

In an updated analysis of CheckMate-586, investigators found that tumor mutational burden identified patients with non–small cell lung cancer who were more likely to respond to first-line combination immunotherapy with nivolumab and ipilimumab.