New treatment in trial for previously treated small cell lung cancer shows promising results

Small cell lung cancer is an aggressive malignancy, accounting for 15 percent of lung tumors. The three-year survival rate for patients with this type of disseminated stage tumor is 6 percent. Treatment options are scarce, and have barely improved in recent decades.

A new paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine shows that a new treatment for small cell lung cancer currently in clinical trials improves patient survival.

This is a phase II study (which evaluates effectiveness of a new treatment) with 220 patients with the drug tarlatamab, from the biotechnology company Amgen.

The conclusions reveal that “tarlatamab, administered as a 10-mg dose every 2 weeks, showed antitumor activity with durable objective responses and promising survival outcomes in patients with previously treated small-cell lung cancer,” the authors write in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The work was coordinated by Luis Paz-Ares, head of Oncology Department at Hospital 12 de Octubre and director of CNIO-H12O Lung Cancer Research Unit at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO).

The definitive demonstration that tarlatamab is better than existing treatment options will come from the phase III trial that is already underway. Approval will then have to be sought from the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) and EMA (European Medicines Agency).

For Paz-Ares, “the availability of this drug is important news for patients and for the physicians who treat this disease. It is the birth of a new therapy”.

The trial has been funded by Amgen.

Imagen: Luis Paz-Ares, head of Oncology Department at Hospital 12 de Octubre and director of CNIO-H12O Lung Cancer Research Unit at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO). /Laura M. Lombardía. CNIO

Reference article: Ahn MJ, Cho BC, Felip E, Korantzis I, Ohashi K, Majem M, Juan-Vidal O, Handzhiev S, Izumi H, Lee JS, Dziadziuszko R, Wolf J, Blackhall F, Reck M, Bustamante Alvarez J, Hummel HD, Dingemans AC, Sands J, Akamatsu H, Owonikoko TK, Ramalingam SS, Borghaei H, Johnson ML, Huang S, Mukherjee S, Minocha M, Jiang T, Martinez P, Anderson ES, Paz-Ares L; DeLLphi-301 Investigators. Tarlatamab for Patients with Previously Treated Small-Cell Lung Cancer. N Engl J Med. 2023 Oct 20.

doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2307980.