Lung Cancer Alliance News
American Society of Clinical Oncologists (ASCO) Annual Meeting
The ASCO Annual Meeting is considered a premier educational and scientific event; bringing together nearly 30,000 national and international participants in the oncology community. In 2005, the ASCO Annual Meeting was held May 13-17 in Orlando, Florida.
Lung Cancer Alliance at ASCO
Avastin
Other ASCO Medical News
Lung Cancer Alliance at ASCO
Kay Cofrancesco, Program Specialist, mans the booth in Orlando.
Lung Cancer Alliance unveiled its new name and look to the oncology community at ASCO. Our booth featured our recently launched ad campaign, new materials such as the Lung Cancer Alliance brochure and fliers, and spring 2005 newsletter. Visitors to the booth from around the world signed “No More” t-shirts in honor or in memory of loved ones and patients with lung cancer.
The Lung Cancer Alliance exhibit was visited by doctors, nurses, other health professionals, other patient advocates, and industry representatives. LCA also conducted meetings with stakeholders; attended sessions and more during the 2005 ASCO Meeting. An interview with LCA President Laurie Fenton was part of the lead story on Saturday night’s television news broadcast on NBC-2 in Orlando, FL. The story featured news on bevacizumab (Avastin). Ms. Fenton was also interviewed by CNN radio on the topic of lung cancer at ASCO.
The most prominent lung cancer news coming out of the conference regarded Avastin. Please see below for more information. In the coming week, Lung Cancer Alliance will review and present other interesting lung cancer presentations from ASCO. Please watch this space for those updates.
Avastin
ASCO featured several presentations on bevacizumab (Avastin) during the Saturday, May 14 plenary session at their annual meeting. Two of the three presentations regarded colon cancer and the third regarded a Phase III clinical trial in non-small cell lung cancer. Avastin was used in combination with chemotherapy for “previously untreated” patients with non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer. Patients received a combination of chemotherapy (Taxol and carboplatin) and bevacizumab. The data reiterated earlier reports of extended median survival by 2.3 months (from 10.2 months with chemotherapy alone to 12.5 months with the addition of bevacizumab). The study also found that median progression free survival (the time before the cancer progresses) was 6.4 months versus 4.5 months. The investigators released information regarding adverse events and their preliminary analysis showed fatal bleeding from the lungs occurred in 1.2% of those receiving the combination, a lower estimate than previously reported and lower than in the Phase II trial.
Please note that patients with brain metastases, squamous cell carcinoma and/or a history of bleeding in the lungs were excluded from the Phase III studies reported at ASCO.
The investigators concluded that adding Avastin to Chemotherapy for people with non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer “provides a statistically & clinically significant survival advantage with tolerable toxicity. PCB* is ECOG's** new treatment standard in this patient population.”
* Paclitaxel (Taxol), Carboplatin, and Bevacizumab (Avastin)
** Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group
For Further Reading on Avastin
ASCO 2005 Daily News article about this plenary session
National Cancer Institute News Release
Genentech Press Release
ASCO Abstract (you can also hear the presentation on this webpage)
Other ASCO Medical News
Drs. Claudia Henschke and Yankelevitz continue to develop protocols for lung cancer screening using low-dose CT scans. Their groups presented two posters at ASCO. You can read the Scientific Abstract for a poster on CT screening for lung cancer: Risk of dying of "competing" causes of death presented by authors R. Yip, C. Henschke, D. Yankelevitz. Dr. Henschke had a second poster titled “Screening for Lung Cancer: Individualized benefit by risk indicators for the first round of screening”
Lung cancer presentations included some on what’s been learned about EGFR mutations in the year since their discovery.
One poster that many people visited was about a Phase II study using erlotinib (Tarceva©) as treatment for people who haven’t had prior treatment. Click here to read the abstract of this study done in Italy. Tarceva is currently approved in the U.S. only for use with failure of at least one prior chemotherapy regimen. There was another interesting poster on what would be a less expensive method of predicting whether or not a person’s tumor(s) will respond to an EGFR TKI by using smoking history. This study was conducted only on the adenocarcinoma tumor type.
ASCO had many Educational Sessions. There was one comprising a thought-provoking series of talks on “Can Society Afford State-of-the-Art Cancer Treatment?”
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