Bringing Light to More Personalized Medicine in Lung Cancer After ASCO 2025

During the 2025 ASCO Annual Meeting, key updates were shared across all of oncology, including across lung cancer care. These updates are important for patients to learn more about, as these new data are driving the future of their care and changing the standards in which they are treated.

Expert oncologists, Dr. Joshua K. Sabari and Dr. Eric K. Singhi, sat down to discuss these updates and share their thoughts on how this affects patients and caregivers in an interview hosted by Singhi.

Singhi, an assistant professor in the Department of General Oncology and the Department of Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology, Division of Cancer Medicine, at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, kicked off the conversation by discussing key outcomes from the CheckMate 816 trial; five-year overall survival updates from the study were shared at the meeting.

The trial evaluated treatment with a combination of chemotherapy plus immunotherapy given before surgery compared with chemotherapy alone before surgery. What investigators found is that patients who were treated with the combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy before surgery benefited most compared with those who did not receive the investigative treatment. Moreover, at the five-year update, 65% of patients were still alive when treated with the investigative regimen compared with 55% of patients alive who had chemotherapy alone before surgery.

"Whenever a patient goes gets their tumor removed, after surgery, we look under the microscope, and we look to see how many cancer cells are still alive. What we saw was that in patients that got chemotherapy and immunotherapy together before surgery, there was a higher chance of having no living cancer cells still there at the time of surgery. So that was really important," Singhi explained in the interview.

Moreover, Sabari went on to ask Singhi about the treatment of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose disease has a KRAS G12c mutation; patients with this mutation make up approximately 30% of all NSCLCs. Singhi responded by saying that the big question in this patient population is to see if some of these targeted therapies can be moved into earlier stages of treatment.

The pair concluded by calling for more actionable, phase 3 data where an experimental treatment is tested versus a control arm.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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