Drs. Rodney Landreneau, director of the lung center at UPMC Shady Side Hospital as well as the Head of Thoracic Surgery at UPMC Passavant Medical Center and Director of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at UPMC St. Margaret Medical Center, and Matthew Schuchert assistant Professor of Surgery in the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, presented a new non small cell lung cancer study at the 2011 Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) conference in San Antonio, Texas.
The study, titled, “Assessment of In Vitro Chemoresponsiveness to Platinum Based Chemotherapy Doublets Lead to Improvements in ‘Individualized’ Therapy for Resected Non Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC),” demonstrates that while 35% of patient specimens evaluated in vitro are resistant to all three standard platinum doublets tested, 28% demonstrate a uniquely variable response, suggesting therefore that ChemoFx? chemoresponse testing may help guide optimal selection of the platinum doublet for treatment, a factor that may be crucial to the patient’s outcome.
Christine Gan, Ph.D., a medical science liaison for Precision Therapeutics, noted, “Selecting the optimal platinum doublet for individual NSCLC patients is not straightforward when three equally efficacious options exist. ChemoFx?, a proprietary drug response marker which measures an individual’s malignant tumor response to a range of standard therapeutic alternatives under consideration by a physician, can, when used as a tool in conjunction with a physician’s clinical judgment, potentially help guide the selection of therapy in this difficult to treat disease.”
According to recent statistics, lung cancer is currently responsible for 29% of cancer deaths in the United States, which represents more deaths than breast cancer, colon cancer, and prostate cancer combined. Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer deaths for both men and women.
