Dr. Gainor on Neoadjuvant Use of Biomarkers in Nonmetastatic Lung Cancer

Justin F. Gainor, MD, director of Targeted Immunotherapy, Massachusetts General Hospital, and assistant professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, discusses a neoadjuvant use of biomarkers in nonmetastatic lung cancer.

There is intense interest in trying to understand biomarkers of response to checkpoint inhibitors, says Gainor. One of the key avenues to understanding the mechanisms of response to checkpoint inhibitors is through tissue. By gathering a sample of tissue from the tumor site, physicians are able to see whether or not there are specific genomic markers present and what is occurring in the immune microenvironment.

A neoadjuvant approach allows investigators to obtain tissue before and after treatment to determine how the tumor has changed in response to therapy. This is one of the reasons why there has been some enthusiasm for the neoadjuvant approach of biomarkers because it allows investigators to obtain more tissue, concludes Gainor.