Dr. Rudin on Expansion of Immunotherapy in Lung Cancer

Charles M. Rudin, MD, PhD, the Sylvia Hassenfeld Chair in Lung Cancer Research, chief, Thoracic Oncology, co-director, Druckenmiller Center for Lung Cancer Research, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the current landscape of immunotherapy in lung cancer and how he expects the treatment to expand.

Immunotherapy has been a transformative treatment in lung cancer in many ways, but it does not work in all patients, says Rudin. In terms of durable responses, immunotherapy works in a minority of patients. Rudin wants to expand the utility of immunotherapy to allow more patients to experience the durable, long-term benefit that some patients are able to achieve.

There are a number of strategies that are in development to try to augment the efficacy of immunotherapy to induce responses in tumors that would otherwise not be responsive to these agents. Rudin is particularly interested in the use of oncolytic viruses to induce immunoreactivity within tumors. Since the immune system is designed to fight infections, creating a local infection within the tumor microenvironment is, in some ways, an ideal way to fight the tumor, explains Rudin.