Karen Kelly, MD, Discusses When to Start Immunotherapy

Karen Kelly, MD, of the University of California, Davis, talks about her work in examining when patients should start treatment with immunotherapy at the 17^thAnnual Winter Lung Conference in Miami Beach, Florida.

Transcription:

I think that this is a really important question in the real world. Although the data is overwhelming and compelling that you should start an immunotherapy with your very first treatment in advanced disease, for the majority of patients who don’t have an oncogenic driver, we have 8 randomized trials showing that the combination with chemotherapy’s efficacious as well as 3 trials showing that monotherapy also is a reasonable first choice option.

And so that is a lot of data, but in the real world, our patients don’t always follow that clinical trial playbook. And sometimes we can’t actually start the IO in the actual cycle 1 which is how they were started in the clinical trials.