From September 7th to September 10th, MedSIR attended the 20th World Conference of Lung Cancer (WCLC), organized by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC). This year’s edition of the world’s largest international gathering of clinicians, researchers and scientists in the field of lung cancer and thoracic oncology was celebrated in MedSIR’s hometown, Barcelona!

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The conference was a great opportunity to present the most recent advances in lung cancer clinical research. Good news included an update of results presented at ASCO 2019 confirming the high activity of AMG510 in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harboring the G12C KRAS mutation (around 13% of NSCLC patients). Although it’s still early to celebrate, this could imply the arrival of a new targeted therapy for patients that have had no effective treatments available so far.

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Additional good results with targeted therapies, including selpercatinib for RET-fusion-positive NSCLC and larotrectinib for KTRK-fusion-positive NSCLC were also communicated. Regarding small cell lung cancer (SCLC), the first reported results of the CASPIAN trial with durvalumab confirmed the role of immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy as the new standard of care for frontline treatment of the disease.

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All these advances increase the percentage of lung cancer patients which are candidate to novel, more effective treatments. But the WCLC 2019 congress was also highly focused on early detection, a crucial strategy in its own right to decrease the burden of the disease worldwide. New studies highlighting the potential of early screening to reduce mortality were presented during the conference, and a renewed international push to apply this strategy is to be expected in the near future.

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 The venue also served as the perfect meeting point between researchers, industry memb ers, patients and clinicians from all around the world. At MedSIR, we used this opportunity to generate new contacts and to advance the development of clinical research projects which we expect will also contribute to bring hope to people with lung cancer and to their caregivers worldwide. See you all next year in Singapur for the WCLC 2020 conference!

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