Transcript
Announcer:
This is Project Oncology on ReachMD. Today, we’ll hear from Dr. Angel Qin, a Clinical Associate Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School. She’ll discuss the potential for ALK vaccines to extend the durability of targeted therapy in non-small cell lung cancer. Here’s Dr. Qin now.
Dr. Qin:
What's been disappointing for ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer is that conventional immunotherapy—so with checkpoint inhibitors, pembrolizumab, nivolumab, and all the ones that we can use—really hasn't panned out in terms of efficacy. And so for a long time, we really thought about immunotherapy not being a rational option for our patients.
But I think that's only looking at the immune system from one very narrow perspective. We're learning more and more that the immune system does a whole lot of different things, and maybe even different in different organs. So I think the idea of an ALK vaccine, at least as it currently stands, is if it's not stimulating those T cells like we do with checkpoint inhibitors, maybe it's not that PD-L1 is not the way to stimulate. Maybe it's presenting this antigen that we know is present on ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancers.
And I think what is really exciting about vaccines is perhaps the potential to extend the benefit of current ALK TKIs. We know that while they can be very durable, progression is inevitable in many cases. And a lot of our patients are young. So even if you have seven-year progression-free survival, when your patients are being diagnosed in their 20s and 30s, you really think there's got to be more that we can do. And so the idea is we have a really good, potent TKI, but can we now use your body's own immune system and harness that potential to extend the life of that TKI?
Announcer:
You just heard Dr. Angel Qin discussing how ALK vaccines could be used in the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer care. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Project Oncology on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
