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).
Roy S. Herbst, MD, PhD, of Yale University, discusses two key abstracts from the ADAURA trial: the use of osimertinib as adjuvant therapy for resected EGFR-mutated non–small cell lung cancer; and patient-reported outcomes, which showed a benefit in disease-free survival and maintenance of health-related quality of life in patients with resected stage IB to IIIA disease (Abstracts OA06.04 and OA06.03).
Jill Feldman, a patient advocate who has lost five family members to lung cancer and is herself a 12-year cancer survivor living with EGFR-positive disease, describes her family history of cancer, how she has worked with her physicians for more than a decade to survive her own diagnosis, and the message she would like all oncologists to hear.
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).
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).
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).
