Dr. Aggarwal on Triplet Therapy in EGFR-Mutant Lung Cancer

Charu Aggarwal, MD, assistant professor of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, discusses triplet therapy in EGFR-mutant lung cancer.

Physicians have become so used to using triplet therapy in the frontline treatment of lung cancer, says Aggarwal, but that is a different triplet of chemotherapy plus immunotherapy. Physicians are now starting to look at chemotherapy in combination with a tyrosine kinase inhibitor for EGFR-mutant lung cancer, explains Aggarwal.

The authors of a Japanese study showed that progression can be delayed by more than 20 months and make a dent in overall survival (OS). The OS improvement was quite significant at 52 months. These are data that should be looked at more carefully, says Aggarwal. It added more toxicity as expected. There was more myelosuppression and the usual chemotherapy-related side effects, but investigators combined it with gefitinib (Iressa), which is well tolerated.