Second-Line Therapies in the Treatment of NSCLC
Edward B. Garon, MD, MS, University of California, Los Angeles, Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses second-line therapies for the treatment of patients with NSCLC.
Transcript:
Edward Garon: Hello. I'm Edward Garon from the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA. I'm excited to have had the opportunity to give these talks at the meeting here in Long Beach, local for me this year. The last talk that I gave at the meeting was on second-line therapies.
This is a talk that has changed tremendously, after really stagnation. Docetaxel had been the established second-line therapy for over a decade, but now there have been several changes. One was the addition of Bevacizumab to docetaxel. What was more profound was, in many respects, the incorporation of immunotherapy in previously treated patients.
That being said, now patients are generally receiving their immunotherapy as part of frontline therapy. What to do in the second-line therapy, is really a very difficult topic to address. I think it is one of significant interest. There's a lot of clinical trial development, but to date, the only approved regimens are still those cytotoxic therapies.
One of the things that I addressed is that we are making a lot of our decisions based on small retrospective studies, some of which show that patients who have had prior immunotherapy do better when they have subsequent chemotherapy, and some that show that they don't. I think that hopefully over time, we will have better data that's able to help guide us in these decisions.
