“Did you smoke?” is a common, and not always easy question, which people are asked when they get lung cancer. It may not be a nice question, but it is increasingly important for deciding your treatment.
Smoking is, of course, the primary cause of lung cancer, but non-smokers can, and do, develop this disease. Researchers have made progress in understanding the differences between lung cancer in smokers versus non-smokers, says Dr. Ronald Natale, a medical oncologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and they’re developing targeted treatments that will be able to address the genetic drivers of lung cancer in non-smokers.
Read More Targeted cancer therapy attacks very specific molecules within a tumor that are involved in its growth and spread. Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) is approved for treating lung cancers that express PD-L1 or Programmed death-ligand 1. This therapy blocks a protein called PD-L1, which hides and protects the tumor from the immune system. Nivolumab (Opdivo) is approved in combination with Ipilimumab (Yervoy) for the first-line treatment of patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer whose tumors express PD-L1 (≥1%) with no EGFR or ALK genomic tumor aberrations.
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