From MedScape

Hello. I’m Mark Kris from Memorial Sloan Kettering, reporting on the recent 12th Annual New York Lung Cancers Symposium held here in New York City on November 11.

We gathered experts and physicians treating lung cancer in the metro New York area, from New Brunswick to New Haven, to review how we care for people and consider new areas of development that affect our field. We discussed advances in targeted therapies, anti-angiogenesis drugs, and spent a lot of time on how these anti-drugs that are immune checkpoint inhibitors are going to be used with radiation and surgery. We talked a lot about how we can get those drugs to the right patient at the right time in their care.

Thoughts on Convergence

The overall theme for this meeting, however, was one that reflects the practice of oncology in general, and if I could use a term for it, it would be “convergence.”

We talked about using various modalities and had a specific lecture about the treatment of oligometastatic disease and oligoprogression. Regarding the care of patients with stage IV disease, there was also a lot of talk about how to manage isolated metastases, particularly those in the central nervous system.

These are the issues we face every day. Frankly, they’re issues for which there are not a lot of high-level data that people can draw from to uniformly agree on changes [to practice].

Additionally, there was more discussion about the convergence of drugs in systemic therapies within the therapeutic classes. Particularly in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) space, folks are not just talking about using a drug targeting that receptor, but about a drug targeting resistance pathways. For example, when you have MET amplification after EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor resistance, this would mean adding a MET drug. We’re also using these second target agents before resistance happens, such as giving a METdrug at the time of disease presentation or a human epidermal growth factor–2 drug to try to prevent resistance at that time.

Another topic is convergence across therapeutic classes. There was a huge amount of discussion about giving chemotherapy with checkpoint inhibitors and also giving other classes of drugs. For example, do you give an anti-angiogenesis drug with an anti-programmed death-ligand–1 drug?
Learn more