Personalized Medicine and Targeted Therapy May Hold Promise in Lung Cancer

Looking towards the future, personalized medicine and targeted therapy may “be the way” for lung cancer care, said Guilherme Sacchi de Camargo Correia, MD.

As part of a visit to Georgia Cancer Center in Augusta, Georgia, CancerNetwork® spoke with Correia about how he hopes to see the lung cancer paradigm evolve in the future with regard to research and treatment. Although modalities like CAR T-cell therapy may represent a more challenging approach in lung cancer, he noted that the field will eventually “get there.”

Correia, clinical assistant professor at Augusta University and thoracic and head and neck medical oncologist at Georgia Cancer Center, emphasized thinking about how to sequence additional lines of treatment when novel targeted therapies initially fail to achieve efficacy. He also suggested that further researching resistance mechanisms and alternative strategies to target one’s disease may yield more efficacious therapies with fewer toxicities.

Transcript:

Personalized medicine and targeted therapy are going to be the way for lung cancer. It’s a very complex disease. We call it one disease, but [it includes] so many under that umbrella term. Newer therapies in terms of the immune system, like advancements in CAR T-cell therapies, might come to lung [cancer], but until we bridge that gap, that might be talking into a longer-term future. I think we will get there, but just considering how important that is and just the physiologic, anatomic, and histologic characteristics of the lung, that might be a relatively more challenging approach, even though I think we’ll get there.

For now, targeted therapy is trying to better understand how we can not only develop treatments that are less toxic with better efficacy but also trying to see the next line of treatment. What can we do once those therapies fail? For a lot of cases, if someone is on a targeted therapy, and if that therapy fails the patient, then the next one becomes chemotherapy, and we go back to our classic standards of care. We might be able to develop new targeted therapies and develop new antibody drug conjugates that target those molecules from a different side. If you’re thinking about pills like osimertinib [Tagrisso] or alectinib [Alecensa], they’re targeting the tyrosine kinase pocket in those molecules. If we bind something with an antibody-related drug that’s from outside, maybe you’re binding something different. That’s going to be the way: trying to look deeper into those resistance mechanisms, and from there, build the newer therapies that we hope [will have] less toxicity.