Dr Salgia on Curing Advanced Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer

What would it actually take to cure stage IV lung cancer? For Ravi Salgia, MD, PhD, thoracic medical oncologist and chair of medical oncology at City of Hope, that question is the driving force behind a new national trial designed to predict which patients will respond to immunotherapy and why.

In this video, Dr Salgia looks past the trial's immediate goals to its larger ambition: not just controlling metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), but curing it. He discusses what a positive trial readout could mean for clinical practice, from expanding the population of patients who benefit from immunotherapy to better predicting who will experience early treatment failure and using that knowledge to guide treatment decisions in real time.

Drawing on more than 35 years in medical oncology, Dr Salgia also speaks to where the field is headed next: earlier lung cancer screening programs, better tools for long-term surveillance after a patient is cured, and a continued belief in combining chemotherapy, targeted therapy, and immunotherapy across a multidisciplinary care team.

This trial, part of ARPA-H's ADAPT program, is one piece of a broader push to bring biomarker-driven, personalized treatment strategies to patients with metastatic disease. City of Hope is the only institution in the country to receive ARPA-H funding for lung cancer research through this initiative, with related studies also underway in breast and colon cancer.

For more on the trial itself, including its design and how patients can enroll, watch Can Doctors Predict Who Immunotherapy Will Work For? City of Hope Aims to Find Out.