Happy Holidays!

From LCKRC, we wish the world the best of this holiday season! We hope you have spent and are still spending time with the family and friends you know and love and the family and friends you now know and love.  As we reflect over good food and better drinks, this past year has seen great things for lung cancer.  

The number of people dying from lung cancer has decreased over the past twenty to thirty years with continued improvements in decreasing new cases and better treatments. Hats off to the researchers who continue to improve lung cancer screening, prevention and therapies. 

This year has seen the FDA approval of many new precision oncology medicines to add to the remarkably effective immunotherapies. Precision oncology describes a class of medicines that attempt to selectively target the part of the cancer cell that went bad and caused the tumor. More to come on this later but the basic premise is the idea that we can now look into the cancer cells machinery, understand what broke to produce the tumor and apply a medicine that specifically targets what broke. These medicines have improved outcomes with less side effects. A Win Win scenario in our estimation. 

Immunotherapy (also more to come later on this) describes medicines that invigorate a patient’s own immune system to attack the cancer cells. Two basic classes of these immunotherapies exist. One stimulates the patient’s immune system to make an immune response against the tumor and the other unleashes the patient’s anti-tumor immune response to destroy the tumor. Both are very effective for those people who respond to these medicines. 

Despite these improvements, people are still dying of lung cancer. And this must stop. Because No One should die of lung cancer. Together, we can make a difference!