Shubham Pant, MD, on the Future of Treatment of Pancreatic Cancer With Targeted Therapies

In an interview with CancerNetwork® during the 2022 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, Shubham Pant, MD, associate professor in the Department of Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology, Division of Cancer Medicine at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discussed the importance of next-generation sequencing (NGS) in gastrointestinal malignancies such as pancreatic cancer and the future role of targeted therapies.

Transcript:

[In terms of] where I see these research efforts [going], I’m going to [use] pancreatic cancer as an example because that’s something that I treat a lot. We can now find these needles in a haystack [with regard to biomarkers]. FGFR mutations and fusions [occur in] about 1% to 2% [of patients with] pancreatic cancer. The response [to targeted therapy is] around 30%. It’s an encouragement and we recommend that all physicians or medical oncologists who are treating pancreatic cancer do next-generation sequencing testing on their patients so we can identify these [markers]. We’re really getting towards this cadre of targeted therapies in patients with pancreatic cancer. We have 1% [of patients] with NRG1 fusions, 1% with NTRK fusions, and 1% to 2% [have microsatellite instability]. This all adds up to quite a lot. That’s one of the big take home messages from this. If the drug is hitting the driver mutation target and we can get good responses even in hard to treat tumors.

Reference

Loriot Y, Schuler MH, Iyer G, et al. Tumor agnostic efficacy and safety of erdafitinib in patients (pts) with advanced solid tumors with prespecified fibroblast growth factor receptor alterations (FGFRalt) in RAGNAR: Interim analysis (IA) results. J Clin Oncol. 2022;40(suppl 16):3007. doi: 10.1200/JCO.2022.40.16_suppl.3007