New Lung-MAP Trial Begins For Evaluating New Lung Cancer Drugs
A new Lung-MAP study, launched by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) along with the SWOG cancer group, a number of private foundations, and five pharmaceutical companies, is aiming to find new drugs for squamous cell lung cancer. While drug companies have come together for prospective studies in the past, this study’s scope and size are relatively surprising. Through this collaboration, the researchers will be identifying the molecular abnormalities in patients and examining each patient on an individual basis for the likelihood of a chemical response to a particular drug.
Dr. Thomas Lynch, who works at the Director of the Smilow Cancer Center at Yale, commented on the new study. “This study breaks down some of the barriers that keep patients out of clinical trials. If you screen 100 patients, and find just 10 have the abnormality relevant to the trial, that can be frustrating to patients and doctors. What’s exciting about the way Lung-MAP is designed is that with the ‘master protocol,’ there’s something for everyone. Everyone who enrolls is eligible for an investigational agent. That doesn’t mean the drug will work, but at least there’s something to test for each patient,” he said.
Lung cancer is one of the most deadly forms of the disease, and it is estimated that about 224,000 Americans will be diagnosed with it in this year alone. 159,000 Americans will die from lung cancer this year. More than 1.8 million people around the world are fighting lung cancer. Squamous cell lung cancer is closely associated with smoking and researchers estimate that it accounts for about one fourth of all lung cancer cases.