The treatment of patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in recent years has been increasingly guided by biomarker testing. Testing has centered on driver genetic alterations involving the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) rearrangements. The presence of these mutations is predictive of response to targeted therapies such as EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) and ALK TKIs. However, there are substantial challenges for the implementation of biomarker testing, particularly in emerging countries. Understanding the barriers to testing in NSCLC will be key to improving molecular testing rates worldwide and patient outcomes as a result. In this article, we review EGFR mutations and ALK rearrangements as predictive biomarkers for NSCLC, discuss a selection of appropriate tests and review the literature with respect to the global uptake of EGFR and ALK testing. To help improve testing rates and unify procedures, we review our exp..... READ ARTICLE
OncoTargets and Therapy DOI:10.2147/OTT.S313669
Authors: Mercedes L Dalurzo, Alejandro Avilés-Salas, Fernando Augusto Soares, Yingyong Hou, Yuan Li, Anna Stroganova, Büge Öz, Arif Abdillah, Hui Wan and Yoon-La Choi
Background: ALK-tyrosine kinase inhibitors increase ORR and PFS times in ALK-fusion positive NSCLC patients. It is therefore crucial to assess the efficacy of different methods for detecting ALK rearrangement. At present, there are most testing methods approved by cFDA to detect ALK rearrangement in China. However, many issues regarding to the procedure and quality control (QC) data of ALK testing in the routine clinical practice is still to be studied. This study is to evaluate the ALK testing platforms, testing procedures, result interpretation quality control and clinicopathological characteristics of ALK positive patients in the real world for Chinese lung cancer patients, and achieve expert consensus on the clinical practice of ALK testing. Conclusion: NSCLC patients harboring ALK gene translocation have unique clinicopathological characteristics. Some problems will still be encountered in the real world clinical practice of ALK testing, which need to be guided by establishment of expert consensus. READ ARTICLE
Journal of Thoracic Oncology DOI:10.1016/j.jtho.2019.08.1034
Authors: J. Ying, L. Li, W. Li, Y. Li, Q. Xia, X. Teng, Y. Liu, G. Chen, X. Qiu, W. Wu, Ji, Z. Wang, X. Yan, Y. Han, A. The Ratical Study Group