Balazs Halmos, MD, MS, Discusses Metastatic Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Advancements

Balazs Halmos, MD, MS, from Montefiore Albert Einstein Cancer Center, discussed how advanced treatments of metastatic non-small cell lung cancer could lead to potentially curative treatment at the Annual New York Lung Cancers Symposium^®.

Transcription:
Well I’m very excited about the advances that we’ve achieved, you know, each day in clinic. Now, you know, I see patients, you know, which we might not have seen in the past with excellent responses, many times durable from targeted therapies. And many times durable and sometimes so lasting on immunotherapies that patients can come off of treatment and might not be even retreating in the future.

So, we changed the landscape and we changed kind of the notion of how we think about metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. We used to call our treatments palliative. That’s not the right word any longer because our treatments are now so successful for some of our patients that actually the terminology, potentially curative treatment, has now come up as the realistic challenge. So now that we can improve that percentage which might be down to 10% at present time, but it’s still much more than in the past, so hopefully we can inch that up with, you know, further investment, and  biomarker research, experimental studies, drug development.