January 13, 2017 – Osimertinib

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Anchor lead:  A new treatment offers hope for people with non-small cell lung cancer, Elizabeth Tracey reports

A new type of therapy for people with non-small lung cancer, which has historically been very hard to treat, has shown quite promising results, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows.  William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, describes the results.

Nelson: The osimertinib did very well. Progression-free survival was improved dramatically the response rate was 71% of the tumors shrunk more with the osimertinib versus only 31% with the chemotherapy combination and the high grade toxicities were less, so this is clearly a drug that is going to be part of the arsenal to treat this kind of non-small cell lung cancer. :23

Nelson says osimertinib targets a known problem in many with this disease.

Nelson: You knew that this receptor was the driver, and yet you couldn’t stop this particular mutant from working and so now that you can I think it opens up the ability to treat many more people.   :09

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.