Advances in lung cancer research and treatment are improving lung cancer outcomes and offering new hope for patients and families. Dr. Thomas Marron, a lung cancer specialist, explains how breakthroughs in immunotherapy and targeted therapies are transforming the way that lung cancer is treated. Dr. Marron also discusses why ongoing testing is necessary throughout cancer care and how clinical trials are shaping the next generation of treatments.
Dr. Thomas Marron is Director of the Early Phase Trials Unit and Associate Director for Translational Research at the Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Center. Dr. Marron is also Professor of Medicine and Professor of Immunology and Immunotherapy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Learn more about Dr. Marron.
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Transcript
Katherine Banwell:
Can you share the latest updates in treatment for people with lung cancer?
Dr. Thomas Marron:
So, there are new updates every day. It’s very exciting to be a lung cancer doctor. And the way we treat lung cancer in 2026 is radically different from the way that we treated it in 2016 where we were really relegated to old-fashioned chemotherapy. Chemotherapy by itself really was never curing cancer, especially cancer that had already spread. But now we have many new targeted therapies and immunotherapies that have really revolutionized the treatment.
So, on one end, the immunotherapies, these are medicines that use your immune system to recognize and attack cancer, they’re now the standard of care from here to China. We give it either alone or in combination with chemotherapy. For the first time, we are, in fact, curing some patients with metastatic lung cancer with the immune therapies. Unfortunately, we’re not curing the majority of patients.
Though the majority of patients do derive some benefit, if not significant benefit from these drugs. But that’s one of the main reasons why we’re doing clinical trials of next generation immunotherapies that we think are going to not only increase the likelihood that a patient will respond to a therapy, but most importantly, increase the likelihood that patients will have really durable responses, even cure.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are targeted therapies. So, these are typically oral medicines, some of them are IV medicines also, that target a very specific either genetic change on a patient’s lung cancer, or sometimes there are proteins that are overexpressed on the cell surface of a cancer. Those are kind of like red flags for a drug.
So, it makes it very easy to target a drug to the cancer. But those red flags are also important in that they allow the cancer to grow. And that’s why cancers choose to put these markers like EGFR and HER2. HER2 is something that commonly we think of as being in breast cancer.
But increasingly we’re seeing that it’s a way in which lung cancer evades our way of treating patients.
Evasion is an important thing because a lot of people will have a good response to whatever first therapy we give people. But unfortunately, cancer has a way of outsmarting us. And sometimes it outsmarts us five years later. Sometimes it’s five months later. So, it’s important, all the questions we’ve been discussing to ask your doctor at the beginning of your treatment journey, if the cancer starts to progress, you should be asking the same questions. You should be saying, “Should we get another biopsy,” either a liquid biopsy, a blood test, or a tissue biopsy.
Because as a cancer develops resistance to a therapy and as it outsmarts our therapy, it changes. And it might be susceptible to a different therapy. So, it’s always good to get as much information at every pivot point, so you make sure you’re pivoting in the right direction.