Historic Perspective on Immunotherapy in Lung Cancer

Transcript:Benjamin P. Levy, MD: The treatment paradigm has been dramatically altered over the past few years with the development of immunotherapeutic approaches, their clinical implementation, and the survival advantages we’ve seen with these drugs. We now know, in the second-line setting, single agent immunotherapy improves survival versus docetaxel. And that’s been a big win because we’ve had very few drugs that we could use in the second-line that were that well tolerated. So, in the second-line, immunotherapy with a single agent checkpoint inhibitor has improved survival over docetaxel. It’s not only shown improvements in response rates and progression-free survival and overall survival, but also, importantly, quality of life.

And now, we have data in the frontline for patients that are advanced stage and that are treatment naive—patients with a tumor proportion score greater than 50%. We now have an immunotherapeutic approach with pembrolizumab, as well, and that also has shown a survival advantage. It’s been a huge win for science, but more importantly, it’s been a huge win for the patients over the past few years with the implementation of immunotherapy into the routine clinical practice for lung cancer patients.

Transcript Edited for Clarity