Dr. Herbst Discusses New Immunotherapy Agents for Lung Cancer

Roy S. Herbst, MD, PhD, a professor of medicine at the Yale Cancer Center and chief of medical oncology at Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven in Connecticut, discusses new immunotherapy agents showing potential as treatment options for patients with lung cancer.

Herbst says these agents are demonstrating response rates of up to 20% in unselected patients with refractory lung cancer. Response rates will increase to 50% if patients are selected for treatment with biomarkers. However, Herbst says, biomarker development is still in the early stages and more research needs to be conducted to fully utilize this approach.

For the patients that don’t seem to be responding to immunotherapy treatment, Herbst says researchers are working to understand why this is occurring and conducting trials to see if there are ways that the immune system can be enhanced so that these agents will work.