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The Case for Adjuvant Immunotherapy in Resectable Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer
At the Great Debates & Updates in Lung Cancer meeting in New York, New York, Patrick Forde, MD, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, debated in favor of adjuvant immunotherapy, vs neoadjuvant immunotherapy, for the treatment of resectable non-small cell lung cancer.
Transcript:
Hello, I'm Dr Patrick Forde, I'm a Medical Oncologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and in the second debate I was involved in at Great Debates and Updates in Lung Cancer, which was looking at the neoadjuvant versus adjuvant immunotherapy for resectable non-small cell lung cancer, I was arguing —somewhat unusually— in favor of the adjuvant setting.
While there's been a lot of very exciting data with neoadjuvant therapy, we also have a long history of using adjuvant therapy in lung cancer and there are some practical advantages. For neoadjuvant therapy, we have to have a very rapid marker testing for PD-L1, EGFR, and ALK, which can be a challenge. Some patients will always be upstaged from stage 1 to stage 2 disease at the time of surgery, so there will always be a role for adjuvant therapy for some patients. And thirdly, I think there is some concern still persistent for patients who don't go to surgery after neoadjuvant therapy. And I think hopefully, we can bring those numbers down over time. But at present, it's something that has to be discussed with the patient when we're considering neoadjuvant chemoimmunotherapy.
Source:
Forde P. Debate: Neoadjuvant vs Adjuvant Therapy – Adjuvant. Presented at Great Debates & Updates in Lung Cancer; September 21-23; New York, NY.
