Bruce E. Johnson, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, offers his expert perspective on single-arm drug approvals for targeted agents between 2016 and 2020, the need for biomarker testing, and the societal costs of drug development (Abstract PL04.03).
Luis M. Montuenga, PhD, of the University of Navarra, discusses the potential contributions of biomarkers, promising biomarker panels being tested and published, the need to standardize biospecimen collection, and how to improve the sensitivity of these biomarkers (Abstract PL05.06).
Giorgio V. Scagliotti, MD, PhD, of the University of Torino, talks about why he believes that many more patients with lung cancer can be cured within the next 4 years, given decreases in mortality rates, widespread use of targeted treatments and immunotherapies, and earlier diagnoses as a result of systematic screening with low-dose CT (Abstract PL05.08).
Martin Reck, MD, PhD, of the LungenClinic, discusses the results from KEYNOTE-799, which explored a new strategy to increase the intensity of treatment in patients with unresectable, locally advanced, stage III non–small cell lung cancer (Abstract OA02.03).
Martin Reck, MD, PhD, of the LungenClinic, discusses findings of the KEYNOTE-598 study, which showed that pembrolizumab plus ipilimumab was more toxic and offered no more benefit in terms of efficacy than pembrolizumab plus placebo in first-line therapy for patients with metastatic high PD-L1–expressing non–small cell lung cancer (Abstract PS01.09).
Dean Fennell, FRCP, PhD, of the University of Leicester, discusses phase III results from the CONFIRM trial, which sought a standard immunotherapy treatment to improve overall survival for patients with mesothelioma who have relapsed after taking pemetrexed and cisplatin. Globally, the incidence of mesothelioma is on the rise; in the United Kingdom alone, it has gone up nearly 500% since the 1970s (Abstract PS01.11).
