VIDEO: Collective understanding of biomarker testing important for EGFR-mutated lung cancer

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To start, pulmonologists in particular, interventional pulmonologists are colleagues who frequently are seeing the patients even before the oncologist and the ones who are getting the tissue biopsies and establishing the diagnosis. I think it's really important that we kinda collectively understand the importance of biomarker testing within the space of not only EGFR lung cancer, but just non-small cell lung cancer in general. You know, it's not enough to just establish the diagnosis and it's important not to just get tissue solely and establish a diagnosis. We need to make sure we have enough tumor tissue at the time of diagnosis to be able to send for a wide array of biomarker testing.

So, in the context of kind of more like wild type tumors, so those patients without EGFR-mutated disease, certainly PD-L1 plays in a very important role, and we need to make sure there's enough tissue for that. But just to be able to diagnose a patient with EGFR lung cancer, we need to make sure that there's enough tumor tissue to be able to run all of our necessary testing. And this includes next generation sequencing that incorporates both the DNA and RNA approach. You know, just doing single gene testing I think is probably not enough at this point. Kind of looking at the wide array of potential kind of co-mutations or resistance mechanisms I think is probably a really important in the space of, in particular of EGFR disease. So, I think this is something that we kind of collectively is really important to understand. In particular, our colleagues who are doing these initial biopsies like interventional pulmonologists. I think it's really important that we kind of all have this kind of shared understanding.

Now as far as both pulmonologists and referring providers like primary care doctors, you know, like I said, frequently patients, newly diagnosed patients are seeing these providers before they even see an oncologist. And I think it's really important to emphasize the importance of hope for these patients. Because frequently sometimes, I'll see a patient who's already just understandably so just so devastated by their diagnosis. But I think it's important for them to, for our patients to kinda really understand from the get-go, the importance of hope and how the facts, especially in the context of EGFR-mutated lung cancer, we have a number of highly effective, well-tolerated therapies available for our patients with EGFR disease. And many of our patients can do very well for a long time with our current treatments. And certainly, there are a number of very promising treatments coming down the pike for our patients for EGFR disease.