Lung Cancer – Non-Chemo Innovations

Transcript

Some oncologists believe that lung cancer is one of the types that we are further behind on on therapy, because it still has a very high lethality. Part of the reason is it’s usually caught pretty late, which is why, in 2021, the guidelines have gotten broader to see who qualifies for lung cancer screening that showed survival benefit. Immune therapy came out in 2015 in lung cancer and greatly changed the way we treat it, especially in a stage four setting and how long people can live a good quality of life despite having metastatic lung cancer. One of the biggest advances we’ve made in lung cancer is targeting what we call actionable mutations. These are proteins that we test for on the actual lung cancer that we can attack often with oral therapy and not need what we call cytotoxic chemotherapy. These targets are predominantly an adenocarcinoma and we still have a lot to do in squamous cell, both of which immune therapy has also made a big role.