Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to Project Oncology on ReachMD. Today, we’ll hear from Dr. Angel Qin, who’s a Clinical Associate Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School. She’ll be exploring what’s next for ALK-positive metastatic non-small cell lung cancer care. Here’s Dr. Qin now.
Dr. Qin:
I think we are all excited for approval of a fourth-generation ALK TKI. Even though many patients are staying on lorlatinib, there are patients who simply cannot tolerate it no matter what we do, and then there are patients who do progress on it. And if you look at the Kaplan-Meier curve, it's about 15 percent of patients who are progressing even within that first year.
So there's clearly a need for a next-generation ALK inhibitor like neladalkib. I think the tricky spot with neladalkib is if the patient's resistance to lorlatinib is still ALK-dependent. Neladalkib is a very potent ALK-specific inhibitor, but if ALK doesn't seem to be playing an important role in driving this resistance anymore, then you have to wonder, is neladalkib still the right drug to give? And I think that's a question that we all have.
We're also looking for roles of other novel treatments in this space. There's work in ALK vaccines, so that's a very exciting space that's, I think, gaining a lot of traction. We're trying to understand about these antibody-drug conjugates that are getting approved in the non-small cell space, is there a specific target there that is more important and relevant to ALK?
And then we're looking also at consolidation strategies. I think that the question still remains: if you have a patient, you start them on a TKI, and they have a very good response, is there a benefit in consolidating, either with radiation or surgery, the remaining spots of perhaps measurable disease? Does that translate into long-term benefits with respect to progression-free survival and overall survival? So even though it's not a very common driver, there is so much going on in this space, and it's really a very exciting time.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Angel Qin discussing the future of treatment for ALK-positive metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. 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!
