Guardant Health recently announced a partnership with the National Cancer Institute, a cancer research SWOG funded consortium, in order to identify the mechanisms of resistance and future treatment options to address patients suffering with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
The study, SWOG-1403, will utilize the company’s circulating tumor DNA test, the Guardant360, in order to examine if the combination EGFR blockade using the combination of cetuximab and afatinib is superior to afatinib used alone as a frontline treatment to address 600 patients recently newly diagnosed with EGFR-mutant NSCLC.
As part of the trial, investigators will assess patients’ blood upon enrollment in the study and again upon progression. Physicians will be blinded to the results at first until the time of progression at which researchers can use the findings to make relevant adjustments to therapy.
“NSCLC is an ideal tumor type to test this novel technology due to the known genomic complexity and evolution of this genomic landscape after therapy. In the case of patients with EGFR-mutated lung cancer, patients may fail first-line treatment due to the emergence of the T790M resistance mutation, which is one of the targets that Guardant360 will be used to detect,” said David Gandara who is the chair of the SWOG Lung Cancer Committee.
Read More Recent News
According to a recent study published in the journal Radiology and conducted by a team of researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), if patients with lung nodules undergo an annual exam with a key imaging technology, they could be easily identified for potential cancerous nodules, sparing the patients from unnecessary tests and surgery. The researchers found that low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) is a safe and effective imaging-screening tool to monitor nonsolid lung nodules, which can potentially lead to cancer. Lung nodules can be classified as nonsolid, part solid or solid, based on the way that they look on computed tomography, a tool that combines X-ray images and uses computer processing to produce cross-sectional images, or slices, of the blood vessels, bones, and body soft tissues.