Empowering Community Oncology: Ramalingam's Vision for Lung Cancer Care

Suresh S. Ramalingam, MD, FACP, FASCO, professor of hematology and medical oncology, the executive director of the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, and a recent honoree on the prestigious TIME100 Health 2025 list, emphasizes the critical role of community oncologists in translating new advancements in lung cancer research into widespread patient benefit.

While significant advances have been made in lung cancer treatment over the past decade, a major challenge remains: ensuring all eligible patients have access to and are offered these innovative therapies. Ramalingam highlights that keeping pace with the rapid growth of medical literature is a substantial hurdle, particularly for community oncologists managing diverse cancer types.

Ramalingam points to 2 crucial takeaways for community oncology practices: widespread adoption of molecular testing for lung cancer and increased focus on lung cancer screening. He explains that by prioritizing these 2 areas, community oncologists can significantly improve patient outcomes and ensure that the substantial progress in lung cancer research benefits all who need it.

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0:10 | The advances made in the fight against lung cancer are substantial over the past 5 to 10 years. However, we are in a situation where not every patient who would benefit from these therapies is either offered these or has access to them, so widely adopting molecular testing for lung cancer to identify patients or candidates for targeted therapy or immune checkpoint inhibitors is still a work in progress. I think education will play an important role, and reaching out and educating people on the new advances is important. I recently read an article that medical literature is doubling every 7 to 10 days now. It is hard for anyone to keep up with all the advances, and for a community oncologist who is taking care of patients with a variety of diseases, not just one particular cancer type, it is even harder. So it is important for us to make sure everyone has the tools necessary to benefit from the latest knowledge and be able to adapt and apply that for the treatment of patients in their clinics.

1:28 | I would bring up molecular testing for lung cancer and screening for lung cancer as 2 key areas where we should be focused on. I know community oncologists are not seeing patients or candidates for lung cancer screening, that happens in the primary care setting, but I think we all can elevate the message to our colleagues in the primary care and family practice settings that lung cancer can be diagnosed early and treated better if we take up screening in a bigger way than we have done so far. In terms of patients diagnosed with lung cancer, biomarker testing is key to making personalized decisions, whether it is early stage disease or advanced stage disease, so making sure that we are conducting the appropriate evidence based testing in patients with lung cancer is important to improve outcomes.