Lung Cancer Dream Team Makes Progress

More than 2 years ago, the American Cancer Society and Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) formed a Lung Cancer Dream Team and charged it with the mission of finding a new or more effective treatment for a hard-to-treat type of lung cancer that has a mutation in a gene called KRAS (KAY-rass).

In this interview, Pasi A. Jänne, MD, PhD, a coleader on the team, provides a high-level overview of what they have learned so far, the clinical trials they’re running, and their hope for the future. Jänne is 1 of the 3 coleaders for the Lung Cancer Dream Team. He’s a clinician and researcher at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

"This is where we're really leveraging the power of the Dream Team group,” Jänne explains. “We’re able to pool our resources. So now, we can look at hundreds and hundreds of patients treated with immunotherapy to learn why some patients respond and some don’t.” It’s more than any single institution could study. “By pooling our numbers, we have the power to answer some questions. It’s been a very successful effort as a part of this grant,” he says. “And it’s ongoing.”

Q. What are you learning about putting the 2 types of treatment together?

A. This is the 3rd goal of the study, “to understand if there’s an interaction between immunotherapy and inhibiting the signals of KRAS directly through targeted therapy,” Jänne says. “We hope there’s an intersection between them. But we don’t know. That’s why we’re testing.” They have already started clinical trials combining inhibitors of KRAS signaling and immunotherapy, he says.

“These things take longer than any of us want them to take,” he says. “I think we’ve already strengthened our scientific understanding about KRAS over the course of this grant so far. It remains to be seen whether we’ll have new treatment approaches that merge immunotherapy with targeted therapy ready for clinical trials by the end of the grant, or 1 to 2 years after the grant. Either way, we’ll succeed at our goal of advancing the therapy for this subclass of lung cancer patients,” he says.

Q. How does the team work together?

A. All 8 of the institutions work on all 3 of the project’s goals – improving targeted therapy, better understanding how immunotherapy works, and trying to combine the two treatments. But some groups spend more time on one goal than another, Jänne says. “We have multiple project managers to make sure we’re keeping up with all the schedules,” he says. “The operational aspect has been critical. We have teleconferences or bigger meetings in person to bring ideas together. We also have subgroup meetings that allow us to be more focused.” 

Q. Would you like to see the work of the Dream Team to continue as a group after this grant ends?

A. “There’s a certain activation energy that is needed to start working together and seeing results. We have that momentum going now, so why stop? But we do need to find a way to fund that, so we can, hopefully continue to make discoveries and translate them into new treatments for patients with KRAS-mutant lung cancers.”