How Can Drug Resistance Impact Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer?

How Can Drug Resistance Impact Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer?

How Can Drug Resistance Impact Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Drug resistance can develop for some lung cancer patients, but is there impact to non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC)? Expert Dr. Christian Rolfo from Mount Sinai explains drug resistance, patients who may be at-risk for this issue, and monitoring that is performed for optimal treatment.

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Transcript:

Dr. Nicole Rochester: 

What have we learned about drug resistance as it relates to non-small cell lung cancer? Are there any new developments in that area?

Dr. Christian Rolfo: 

Yeah, obviously the patients of the…as I just commented, we have different patients with different needs and different scenarios, so we are now fragmenting a lot of the diseases, and we have actually different diseases. And one big disease that is the lung cancer, so now we are treating patients in a different way. And some patients have, for example, patients who are under treatment with targeted therapies, they can develop mechanics of resistance that we can nowadays not only identify but also treat. 

So we can treat and change the recurrence of these patients. One of the tools that we are using for that is liquid biopsy, for example, that is this blood draw that we are going for the patients, and actually, we are trying to do this determination from the very beginning and also monitoring the patients after we have this information to see if we are able to determine the mechanics of resistance, see also the outcomes of some of the therapies and change the treatment when it’s necessary. In immunotherapy, we have alterations that are resistant or refractory, that is another way of definitions so refractory we say patients that are not responding during the treatment and resistance of patients that or simply patients that are after the treatment having a progression in a very short time, so we need to identify these two categories and try to treat them in different ways that we have armamentarium for that as well.