By Andrew Ciupek, PhD, Senior Manager, Clinical Research, GO2 for Lung Cancer

A number of studies presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) Annual Meeting related to the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with an EGFR mutation.

Tagrisso remains an important and effective standard of care option for NSCLC with an EGFR mutation. However, many patients eventually develop resistance. As a result, a number of clinical trials are focused on identifying new options for post-Tagrisso treatment.  Several of these were highlighted at ASCO 2021. Among them:

  • The CHRYSALIS trial looked at giving a combination of amivantamab and lazertinib as a second treatment for patients who have experienced progression of their cancer after initial treatment with Tagrisso.
  • A phase I trial looked at giving HER3-Dxd (also known as patritumab deruxtecan) to EGFR-positive patients who had experienced progression on previous EGFR targeted therapies and, in many cases, additional treatments (such as chemotherapy).

Groups of patients in each trial responded to the treatment. These promising results have encouraged the research teams to continue looking at these treatments in larger clinical trials.

There was also research presented at ASCO 2021 that looked at treatment options for patients with an EGFR exon 20 mutation, which is a rarer EGFR mutation that does not respond well to the most common EGFR targeted therapies. The WU-KONG trials looked at giving DZD 9008, a new EGFR exon 20 inhibitor to patients with an EGFR exon 20 mutation. Although the patients in these trials had often received previous treatments and had progression, there was a group that responded to DZD 9008. This suggests that this could be a promising option worth exploring in further clinical trials.