Joshua Bauml, MD of the University of Pennsylvania discusses thoracic oncology in 2018 and the importance of finding better biomarkers. Finding better biomarkers help in predicting responses to immunotherapy. What is used currently is PD-L1 which is a very imperfect biomarker. According to Dr. Bauml, even for patients who have high expressions in the non-small-cell lung cancer population, the response rate to pembrolizumab is only about 50%. This percentage is way far from the 80 or 90% that is usually seen in targeted therapy.
And, as the combination immunotherapy is be incorporated moving forward, it is essential that, if additional toxicity will be introduced to other drugs, as well as more cost, the important question to address will be who will going to benefit from which combination?