The Problem
Targeted therapies offer personalized lung cancer treatment options for patients with certain mutations or changes in their tumor. Several targeted therapies are currently used successfully to treat lung cancer with changes in EGFR, ALK, ROS, and BRAF. Testing new targeted therapies is difficult since doctors must find the right people with certain changes in their tumor and many changes are rare. Additionally, in order to find out if a patient’s tumor has a certain change doctors must perform a type of test called molecular testing. Having multiple clinical trials that each test patients for one change to evaluate one new targeted therapy at a time is burdensome to patients, inefficient for making new drugs available for those who need them, and costly.
The Study
Lung-MAP is an innovative study for patients with stage IIIB or IV non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Lung-MAP is testing multiple new targeted therapies at once rather than one at a time. Instead of having to undergo multiple tests at different times to find out which targeted therapies may be an option for them, patients instead receive one test for multiple changes. Patients are then given one of the targeted therapies that best matches the changes that were found in their tumor. This new way of doing clinical trials that brings together several drugs from different developers at the same time while promoting sharing of information and research efforts. This leads to better access for patients to promising drugs, better access for researchers to patients with rare changes who may benefit from a drug, and less time and money needed for testing new therapies.
How GO2 for Lung Cancer Is Involved
GO2 for Lung Cancer is one of the patient advocacy Lung-MAP partners. GO2 for Lung Cancer staff attend investigator meetings and provide expertise in the lung cancer patient experience to the study.
How Can You Help?
If you are a patient diagnosed with NSCLC who is looking for additional treatment options your doctor may suggest joining the Lung-MAP trial. Consider joining to access high quality care and new treatments while supporting research to find therapies for lung cancer patients. You can also ask your doctor if molecular testing, targeted therapies, and the LungMAP trial could be good options for you. For more information, visit the Lung-MAP patient page.
How Is This Research Funded?
Lung-MAP is an unprecedented public-private collaboration among: the National Cancer Institute, NCI’s National Clinical Trials Network, SWOG Cancer Research, Friends of Cancer Research, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, several pharmaceutical companies (Amgen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Genentech, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and AstraZeneca’s global biologics R&D arm, MedImmune), Foundation Medicine and several lung cancer advocacy organizations.