Lyudmila Bazhenova, MD, Discusses Potential for Trials Featuring Combination IO/Targeted Therapy for EGFR Exon 20+ and Wild Type NSCLC

At the 2021 World Conference on Lung Cancer, CancerNetwork® spoke with Lyudmilia Bazhenova, MD, of University of California at San Diego, about why she would not recommend conducting another trial utilizing a single agent immune checkpoint inhibitor in wild-type and EGFR exon 20 insertion non–small cell lung cancer. However, she noted that there may be potential for a trial utilizing immunotherapy plus a lung cancer vaccine.

Transcript:

At this point I’m not aware of any of any trial, and I would be reluctant to do the trial with traditionally approved checkpoint inhibition because I think it’s unlikely that they’re going to work. If we would have a combinatorial immunotherapy trial of maybe a combination of lung cancer vaccines and immunotherapy, I think one can envision doing it. [However], in my practice, I do not use checkpoint inhibition for those patients, and I don’t think I would be comfortable enrolling the patient to a monotherapy immune checkpoint inhibition trial.

Reference

Bazhenova L, Girard N, Minchom A, et al. Comparative clinical outcomes between EGFR Exon20ins and wildtype NSCLC treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors. Presented at: 2021 World Conference on Lung Cancer; September 8-14, 2021. Virtual. Accessed September 27, 2021. Abstract P08.04