Summary
For patients taking osimertinib (brand name Tagrisso) to treat a specific type of lung cancer, there’s always been a difficult question waiting in the background: what happens when the drug eventually stops working?
New results from a trial called SAFFRON offer an answer for one specific case.
Osimertinib is a targeted therapy for lung cancer caused by a mutation in a gene called EGFR. Over time, some patients’ cancers find a way around the drug, and one common reason is that the cancer cells start making too much of a different protein, called MET. When that happens, doctors have traditionally switched patients to standard chemotherapy.
The SAFFRON trial tested a different approach: instead of abandoning osimertinib, researchers added a second targeted drug called savolitinib (brand name Orpathys), designed to block MET. Patients who received both drugs together lived longer without their cancer getting worse, and lived longer overall, compared to patients who switched to standard chemotherapy.
This matters because it suggests that when a targeted therapy like this stops working, the right next step may depend on exactly why it stopped working, not just on moving down a fixed list of treatments. A patient whose resistance is driven by MET may do better staying on their original targeted drug and adding a second one, rather than switching entirely.
For that approach to work, though, patients need to be re-tested at the time their cancer starts progressing, to find out what’s actually causing the resistance. Without that step, doctors have no way to know whether a combination like this one would even apply to them.
