Transcript
Announcer:
You’re listening to Project Oncology on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Urs Weber, an Assistant Professor in the Division of Medical Oncology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He’ll be exploring the future of ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer treatment. Here’s Dr. Weber now.
Dr. Weber:
Neladalkib, the fourth-generation TKI, is probably the next ALK-specific therapy that's going to make its way into clinical practice. It does seem to have some efficacy after lorlatinib. I have seen it work in patients who have had disease progression on lorlatinib, so that's encouraging. And there are differences in the toxicity profile as well. So it was specifically designed to have less of those neurocognitive side effects as compared to lorlatinib, and I have seen that play out in patients that I've seen.
We do have to watch liver enzymes, and we see some of those elevations. But it gives another option that seems to have at least comparable efficacy to lorlatinib in what we've seen so far. Obviously, it's going to take a long time for us to get the same long-term follow-up that we have with lorlatinib, but it certainly seems to be a very active drug that has a slightly different side effect profile. In terms of giving patients options and being able to factor in their preferences, it's always good to have some options there.
I think other things that are sort of exciting include the ALK degraders. Instead of inhibiting the ALK protein, the way these ALK degraders work is they actually take advantage of a mechanism that exists in our cells to recycle proteins. And so essentially the idea is here we tag ALK for degradation and actually trick the cancer cell into getting rid of its own driver.
There's ongoing research looking at gilteritinib, which is a leukemia drug, in ALK-positive lung cancer because it does seem to have some ability to block ALK. And so I think there's a broad smattering of things that are going on that are going to continue to move this field forward.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Urs Weber discussing potential treatment approaches in ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer. To access this and other episodes in this series, visit Project Oncology on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
