A popular way to talk about the incredible progress that has been made in lung cancer treatments over the past few years is to share the statistic that more lung cancer treatments have been approved in the past three or five years or than in the previous twenty or thirty or fifty. This is amazing news regardless of the specific details, but you may have wondered about the inconsistencies in the numbers that advocacy groups and advocates use to share this promising trend.

The reason for the variations in this data is that FDA drug approval is incredibly hard to accurately measure. For example, some drugs were first approved as a treatment for late-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and then later were also approved for early-stage NSCLC. Should we count this as one or two new treatments? Other drugs have been approved for many different types of lung cancer. Should each application be counted as a new treatment? Still other drugs have been approved for all cancers, including lung. Should we also include those drugs in the total? Deciding how to count new therapies can be very tricky.

Here’s what we do know for sure: there have been a lot of new treatments approved for lung cancer over the past few years, with more coming all the time. As of early December 2022, the most up-to-date list of FDA approvals relevant to lung cancer show that 41 new therapies have been approved since 2018! And while it is hard to say precisely how many were approved in the 30 years before that, we do know that it is not as many.

Even though we don’t have a universally accepted way of counting the number of lung cancer treatments the FDA has approved over time, it is indisputable that the rate of new drugs approved has increased over the last five years and continues to be strong. This is reason to be very optimistic and hopeful that if you need to change therapies, one will be available for you.