Dr. Eric Singhi on an ‘Unprecedented Moment’ in Lung Cancer

Eric Singhi, MD, a thoracic medical oncologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, shares key highlights in lung cancer from the 2024 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting, including the trending hashtag, #ASCOLung.

“We are rebranding this as #ASCOLung because it’s such an exciting time to be a thoracic oncologist and hear about all these advances for our patients with lung cancer,” Dr. Singhi said.

He spoke about how it felt to witness multiple presentations on historic advancements in lung cancer during the annual meeting.

“This is an unprecedented moment,” Dr. Singhi said. “It’s the first time where we had 3 lung cancer trials that were featured at the crown jewel session, the plenary session…and it was a monumental, unprecedented experience. A lot of us thoracic medical oncologists were in the front row seats just to get the data in real time and appreciate it and better understand it.”

Dr. Singhi broke down the key highlights from the plenary session, including a major update in small cell lung cancer (SCLC) from David R. Spigel, MD.

“One of the studies that we were really excited about was the ADRIATIC study, and that’s looking at how we can potentially practice-change the treatment that we’re giving our patients with limited-stage [SCLC],” Dr. Singhi said. “For decades, we’ve been using concurrent or definitive chemoradiation therapy for these patients and trying to do better… what we saw yesterday is something that I believe is practice changing. We’re going to be able to bring immune checkpoint blockade into the earlier setting for our patients.”

Dr. Singhi also highlighted data from the phase 3 LAURA trial, a double-blinded and placebo-controlled phase 3 trial, that assessed the efficacy and safety of osimertinib in adults with unresectable stage III EGFR-mutated non-small cell lung cancer who received definitive platinum-based concurrent or sequential chemoradiotherapy and did not have progression.

“We’ve seen this theme throughout the years, now [we’re] looking to see for stage III unresectable disease after chemoradiation therapy: Does osimertinib versus placebo really lead to an improvement? We saw that there was definitely a significant progression-free survival benefit,” Dr. Singhi said.