Dr Hatim Husain: NCCN Guidelines Adjust to Meet Lung Cancer Treatment Needs

Hatim Husain, MD, associate professor in the Department of Medicine at UC San Diego, discusses how National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) treatment guidelines adjust to meet the treatment needs of patients with lung cancer, including providing direction for molecularly guided therapies as new indications are approved.

Transcript

How have NCCN guidelines evolved as new targeted therapies for lung cancer have been approved?

NCCN guidelines have included new indications for new agents when appropriate. That list is expanding, with recent additions including KRAS, atypical EGFR variants with the exon 20 insertion, as well as additions in MET and also considerations for agents in development and kind of awaiting results, including HER2.

The NCCN has really been important in terms of including approved guidelines across a number of different new indications for molecularly guided therapies, as well as those which are emerging. And I think that’s an important consideration. Some of the emerging molecularly guided therapies that have been listed on the NCCN guidelines include MET inhibitors for copy number gain, or increased expression, as well as for HER2—specifically for HER2 mutations compared to protein expression or copy number gain that may be important in breast cancer.

The NCCN guidelines have evolved to include the approved agents for molecularly guided approaches, as well as emerging therapies, and give understandings about the applicability of those agents, specifically under circumstances where there is high MET amplification as well as HER2 mutations.