Tagged: Cancer

There are few reported cases of ALK gene rearranged (ALK+) Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) during pregnancy. There is a lack of information on the safety of ALK inhibitors in pregnant patients. We present a 25-year-old African American woman who was diagnosed with metastatic ALK+ lung adenocarcinoma at 15 weeks of gestation. Treatment with alectinib was initiated at 18 weeks’ gestation with resultant radiological treatment response. The patient did not experience any adverse effects from alectinib during her pregnancy.

SCLC is the most aggressive lung cancer histology with a 5-year OS <10%. At the diagnosis, almost two-thirds of the SCLC an Extended Disease presentation. Two randomized studies (CASPIAN and ImPower133) demonstrated an OS improvement, when immunotherapy was prescribed as maintenance therapy after standard chemotherapy. To date, SABR has had a limited indication in managing metastatic SCLC, although recent reports proposed it as a valid treatment option in selected patients. We propose a retrospective multicentric analysis of patients treated with SABR for oligometastatic SCLC.

We read the recent article by Adachi et al1 with great interest. The authors should be applauded for aiming to address a critical question in our field – what is the best way to treat patients with locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer (LA-NSCLC)? We agree with their suggestion that patient and disease-specific factors would dictate the optimal treatment pathway for an individual patient. However, we do not believe that their findings support the specific conclusions that (1) “surgery remains the mainstay of N2-positive [clinical] stage III NSCLC treatment” and (2) “surgery should be cautiously considered for patients with [clinical] T3/4 disease.”