Oncologist Novello, ‘oral lung therapy increases quantity and quality of life’

2023-04-20 12:04:07

“A patient with lung cancer, unlike a person with another cancer pathology such as breast cancer, is a patient who already has comorbidities. Furthermore, lung cancer can give many signs and symptoms: for this reason, having a therapeutic possibility that manages to reduce the amount of the disease and reduce the signs and symptoms related to the disease is an excellent result. Until now these patients were difficult to treat because they respond poorly to therapeutic possibilities such as chemotherapy and immunotherapy”. So Silvia Novello, full professor of Medical Oncology, Department of Oncology, University of Turin and president of Walce Women against lung cancer in Europe on the sidelines of the press conference “Lung cancer: another promise kept”, promoted today by Merck Italy in Rome for the launch in Italy of tepotinib, an oral ‘one a day’ therapy for adult patients with advanced stage non-small cell lung cancer.

Cough, shortness of breath, pain located in the ribcage but not only, catarrh, asthenia not linked to other life conditions “these are the most frequent symptoms of lung cancer but nonetheless non-specific” therefore not attributable to the disease. “Tepotinib, a specific drug that is taken by mouth – continues Novello – certainly gives an advantage in terms of quantity of life, months of added life but also in terms of quality of life”.

The oncologist then rattles off some data on the neoplasm: “It has almost 40 thousand new cases a year in Italy and unfortunately more than half of these are in an advanced stage – she points out – Of these, about 70% are non-small cell lung cancers and therefore they fall into the category of tumors in which we can apply precision medicine in which we have to go and identify predictive biomarkers, including METex14, which affects 2 to 4% of patients with advanced stage non-small cell lung cancer”. A category “of patients which in percentage terms seems small but in reality it is a substantial number and which transversally concerns different age groups, both genders, and both conditions of smoking habit. This means that all patients with this tumor must be tested: the patient, whether female, smoker or ex-smoker or never smoker, may have a possibility of having this molecular alteration ”she concludes.