33 min
ASCO24: Transforming the Lung Cancer Treatment Landscape ASCO Daily News
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- Medicine
Drs. Vamsi Velcheti and Nathan Pennell discuss novel approaches and key studies in lung cancer that were showcased at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting, including the Plenary abstracts LAURA and ADRIATIC.
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: Hello, I am Dr. Vamsi Velcheti, your guest host for the ASCO Daily News Podcast today. I'm a professor of medicine and director of thoracic medical oncology at the Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Nate Pennell, the co-director of the Cleveland Clinic Lung Cancer Program and the vice chair of clinical research at the Taussig Cancer Center in Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Pennell is also the editor-in-chief of the ASCO Educational Book. Today, we will be discussing practice-changing abstracts and the exciting advances in lung cancer that were featured at the ASCO 2024 Annual Meeting.
You'll find our full disclosures in the transcript of the episode.
Nate, we're delighted to have you back on the podcast today. Thanks for being here. It was an exciting Annual Meeting with a lot of important updates in lung cancer.
Dr. Nate Pennell: Thanks, Vamsi. I'm glad to be back. And yes, it was a huge year for lung. So I'm glad that we got a chance to discuss all of these late-breaking abstracts that we didn't get to talk about during the prelim podcast.
Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: Let's dive in. Nate, it was wonderful to see all the exciting data, and one of the abstracts in the Plenary Session caught my attention, LBA3. In this study, the investigators did a comparative large-scale effectiveness trial of early palliative care delivered via telehealth versus in-person among patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer. And the study is very promising. Could you tell us a little bit more about the study and your take-home messages?
Dr. Nate Pennell: Yes, I think this was a very important study. So just to put things in perspective, it's now been more than a decade since Dr. Jennifer Temel and her group at Massachusetts General Hospital did a randomized study that showed that early interventions with palliative medicine consultation in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer significantly improves quality of life and in her initial study, perhaps even overall survival. And since then, there have been numerous studies that have basically reproduced this effect, showing that getting palliative medicine involved in people with advanced cancer, multiple different cancer types, really, has benefits.
The difficulty in applying this has been that palliative care-trained specialists are few and far between, and many people simply don't have easy access to palliative medicine-trained physicians and providers. So with that in mind, Dr. Temel and her group designed a randomized study called the REACH PC trial, where 1,250 patients were randomized with advanced non-small cell lung cancer to either in-person palliative medicine visits which is sort of the standard, or one in-person assessment followed by monthly telemedicine video visits with palliative medicine. Primary endpoint was essentially to show that it was equivalent in terms of quality of life and patient satisfaction. And what was exciting about this was that it absolutely was. I mean, pretty much across the board in all the metrics that were measured, the quality-of-life, the patient satisfaction, the anxiety and depression scores, all were equivalent between doing telemedicine visits and in-person visits. And this hopefully will now extend the ability to get this kind of benefit to a much larger group of people who don't have to geographically be located near a palliative medicine program.
Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: Yeah, I think it's a great abstract, Nate and I actually was very impressed by the ASCO committee for selecting this for the Plenary. We typically don't see supportive care studies highlighted in such a way at ASCO. This really highlights the need for true interdisciplinary care for our patients.
Drs. Vamsi Velcheti and Nathan Pennell discuss novel approaches and key studies in lung cancer that were showcased at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting, including the Plenary abstracts LAURA and ADRIATIC.
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: Hello, I am Dr. Vamsi Velcheti, your guest host for the ASCO Daily News Podcast today. I'm a professor of medicine and director of thoracic medical oncology at the Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Nate Pennell, the co-director of the Cleveland Clinic Lung Cancer Program and the vice chair of clinical research at the Taussig Cancer Center in Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Pennell is also the editor-in-chief of the ASCO Educational Book. Today, we will be discussing practice-changing abstracts and the exciting advances in lung cancer that were featured at the ASCO 2024 Annual Meeting.
You'll find our full disclosures in the transcript of the episode.
Nate, we're delighted to have you back on the podcast today. Thanks for being here. It was an exciting Annual Meeting with a lot of important updates in lung cancer.
Dr. Nate Pennell: Thanks, Vamsi. I'm glad to be back. And yes, it was a huge year for lung. So I'm glad that we got a chance to discuss all of these late-breaking abstracts that we didn't get to talk about during the prelim podcast.
Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: Let's dive in. Nate, it was wonderful to see all the exciting data, and one of the abstracts in the Plenary Session caught my attention, LBA3. In this study, the investigators did a comparative large-scale effectiveness trial of early palliative care delivered via telehealth versus in-person among patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer. And the study is very promising. Could you tell us a little bit more about the study and your take-home messages?
Dr. Nate Pennell: Yes, I think this was a very important study. So just to put things in perspective, it's now been more than a decade since Dr. Jennifer Temel and her group at Massachusetts General Hospital did a randomized study that showed that early interventions with palliative medicine consultation in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer significantly improves quality of life and in her initial study, perhaps even overall survival. And since then, there have been numerous studies that have basically reproduced this effect, showing that getting palliative medicine involved in people with advanced cancer, multiple different cancer types, really, has benefits.
The difficulty in applying this has been that palliative care-trained specialists are few and far between, and many people simply don't have easy access to palliative medicine-trained physicians and providers. So with that in mind, Dr. Temel and her group designed a randomized study called the REACH PC trial, where 1,250 patients were randomized with advanced non-small cell lung cancer to either in-person palliative medicine visits which is sort of the standard, or one in-person assessment followed by monthly telemedicine video visits with palliative medicine. Primary endpoint was essentially to show that it was equivalent in terms of quality of life and patient satisfaction. And what was exciting about this was that it absolutely was. I mean, pretty much across the board in all the metrics that were measured, the quality-of-life, the patient satisfaction, the anxiety and depression scores, all were equivalent between doing telemedicine visits and in-person visits. And this hopefully will now extend the ability to get this kind of benefit to a much larger group of people who don't have to geographically be located near a palliative medicine program.
Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: Yeah, I think it's a great abstract, Nate and I actually was very impressed by the ASCO committee for selecting this for the Plenary. We typically don't see supportive care studies highlighted in such a way at ASCO. This really highlights the need for true interdisciplinary care for our patients.
33 min