Lung Cancer / Mesothelioma
  When I first started OncTalk, there was a lot of buzz about celebrex (celecoxib) as a cancer drug, but almost all of it was among patients talking about it on the internet: oncologists watching the field hadn’t been impressed by the early returns, including this one (despite the fact that some of my earliest work […]
2 Comments  As I’ve described in a prior post, there is some evidence that patients who develop a rash on tarceva (erlotinib) have an improved survival compared to patients who experience no skin toxicity on tarceva. The key question is whether this is an issue of under-dosing some patients, or if it’s just a correlate of overall immune […]
5 Comments  Last year, a provocative trial was presented at ASCO that compared early vs. later taxotere as second line therapy. I described that study here, and it showed a very significant improvement in progression-free survival (PFS) and a near significant improvement in overall survival (OS) for the recipients of taxotere immediately after four cycles of first line […]
5 CommentsAt the 1st ESMO-IASLC Lung Cancer Conference in Geneva last week I saw a presentation that I thought would interest this general readership. The study, presented by Dr Grossi, from Italy, is a retrospective review of 61 patients with advanced NSCLC of all subtypes treated with either Tarceva (erlotinib) or Iressa (gefitinib) […]
3 Comments    So I’ve been invited to be on the faculty of a lung cancer conference in Kauai next month (yes, a good gig, but this is the first year that the flights are so expensive that I can’t bring my family to this normally very family-friendly event), and my topic is to argue in a […]
0 CommentsLast week, the preliminary results of interim analysis the ESCAPE (Evaluation of Sorafenib, Carboplatin, And Paclitaxel Efficacy in NSCLC) trial were presented by Dr. Scagliotti at the 1st IASLC (International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer)-ESMO (Eurpean Society for Medical Oncology) Lung Cancer Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. This was a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind phase […]
0 Comments  Continuing with the analysis of a publication about tarceva (erlotinib) for patients with advanced BAC that I introduced in the last post, we’ll turn now to the analysis that Dr. Vince Miller and colleagues did on the biomarkers that might predict more or less clinical benefit with an EGFR inhibitor like tarceva (abstract here).  The trial looked at three […]
0 Comments  In a recent issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Dr. Vince Miller and colleagues published the results of an important trial of the EGFR inhibitor tarceva (erlotinib) in the unusual NSCLC subtype bronchioloalveolar carcinoma, or BAC (abstract here).  This work was predicated on the observation, also by Dr. Miller and his colleagues at Memorial […]
1 Comments  Tumor cavitation has been one of the issues we really haven’t discussed but that has been a challenging question as we test more and more anti-angiogenic drugs, which target the tumor blood supply, in the setting of lung cancer.  Since we started testing these agents, we’ve noticed that in addition to sometimes increasing the […]
1 Comments  Because the anti-angiogenic drug avastin (bevacizumab) has been associated with some degree of increased risk of bleeding since the beginning of its development in lung cancer, the key trials have historically excluded patients who have been on blood thinners, at least at the standard dose (full dose anti-coagulation, or FDAC). In fact, though, patients […]
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