MADRID – Evaluating one new oncology drug is hard enough, but a novel collaborative clinical trial is taking on the task of testing five experimental drugs at once.
The Lung-MAP trial is using genomic profiling to direct patients to one of five simultaneous sub-studies that best fits their tumor’s genomic profile.
The treatments are for second-line, recurrent squamous cell lung cancer, an area of tremendous unmet need, according to Dr. Roy Herbst, chair of the Lung-MAP steering committee and chief of medical oncology at the Yale Cancer Center, New Haven, Conn.
The novel design of the phase II/III trial should speed up assessment and approval of investigational drugs, and improve the likelihood that patients from the most highly academic to the most rural community sites will receive a targeted therapy.
“It’s really open throughout the country and that makes me very proud that we’re bringing molecular profiling and new drugs to patients of all resource levels,” Dr. Herbst said.
Watch our interview with Dr. Herbst at the annual congress of the European Society for Clinical Oncology, where he spoke about Lung-MAP in a special session on new clinical trial designs.
LungMAP is sponsored by the Southwest Oncology Group with collaboration from several public and private partners including the National Cancer Institute.
Groups interested in participating in Lung-MAP can contact Lung-MAP protocol coordinator Crystal Miwa at cmiwa@swog.org or Dr. Herbst at Roy.Herbst@yale.edu.
Details on the protocol are also available at clinicaltrials.gov or the Lung-MAP website.
Dr. Herbst reported serving on the science advisory board of Biothera, DiaTech Oncology, Koltan, and N of One.