Emerging Therapies | Hope for the Future of Lung Cancer Care
Emerging Therapies | Hope for the Future of Lung Cancer Care from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Lung cancer expert Dr. Jyoti Patel provides updates about emerging research and shares her impressions about the future of lung cancer care.
Jyoti Patel, MD, is Medical Director of Thoracic Oncology and Assistant Director for Clinical Research at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University. She is also Associate Vice-Chair for Clinical Research and a Professor in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Dr. Patel is a leader in thoracic oncology, focusing her efforts on the development and evaluation of novel molecular markers and therapeutics in patients battling non-small cell lung cancer. Learn more about Dr. Patel.
See More from Thrive Lung Cancer
Related Resources:
|
|
|
Transcript:
Katherine:
I’d like to talk about emerging treatments. Are there any therapies in development that patients should know about that you’re excited about?
Dr. Patel:
There are a number of things that are happening right now in the landscape that is really, again, giving us great optimism about how to move forward. So, areas of active research really concentrate on identification of new targets so that we have identified oncogenes that we’re trying to treat effectively. So, those are things like EGFR Exon 20 mutations or HER2 mutations, as well as some of these new fusions.
Another area of rapidly growing research is that most patients who have targeted therapies will eventually develop resistance. And so, understanding how to mitigate resistance or how to overcome resistance is important. And we often talk about the different drugs in development as first-, second-, and third-generation drugs in the EGFR space, which accounts for about 15 percent of lung cancers in the United States. We’re looking at fourth-generation tyrosine kinase inhibitors. They’re certainly very exciting.
The other piece, I think, of research that is moving and that we are looking forward to understanding why some patients have really robust responses to immunotherapies and others don’t. Or how people become immune to the effects of immunotherapy. And so, understanding the tumor microenvironment, seeing if there are other proteins that we can co-stimulate to cause these robust and durable responses to immunotherapy is an area that we’re working on.
Katherine:
Before we close, I’d like to ask, are you hopeful about the potential for people with lung cancer to thrive?
Dr. Patel:
Absolutely. The future is bright after years of working and really developing this great foundational science.
We are seeing the transformation of cancer care in a way that is faster than I could’ve ever imagined at the beginning of my career. We’re bringing scientific insights to the bedside. And bringing it to the bedside is impacting how patients live with their cancer and thrive with their cancer. They’re living longer and with fewer toxicities and side effects than I ever imagined.
I’m optimistic about the promise of early detection through blood tests one day, through screening with CT scans to find early-staged disease in which the cancer is the most curable. And then for patients with more extensive disease, to really understand how we can sequence therapies or deescalate therapies when patients have minimal burden of disease, again, to decrease the toxicities
