The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer announced an open comment period for the “IASLC Multidisciplinary Recommendations for Pathologic Assessment of Lung Cancer Resection Specimens Following Neoadjuvant Therapy” paper.
The paper has been made available here to provide an opportunity for public review of new draft recommendations. The open comment period runs from Oct. 14 to Nov. 7.
With the recent growing number of neoadjuvant therapy clinical trials for non-small cell lung cancer, there is a great need for standardization of specimen processing since major pathologic response has consistently been shown to be an important prognostic indicator.
The purpose of the paper is to outline detailed recommendations on how to process lung cancer resection specimens and to define pathologic complete response including major pathologic response and pathologic complete response following neoadjuvant therapy.
“Currently there is no established guidance on how to process and evaluate resected lung cancer specimens following neoadjuvant therapy in the setting of clinical trials and clinical practice,” Giorgio Scagliotti, past president of the IASLC and co-author of the paper, said in a statement. “There is also a lack of precise definitions on the degree of pathologic response, including MPR or pCR.”
IASLC is making an effort to collect such data from existing and future clinical trials. These recommendations are intended as guidance for clinical trials, although it is hoped they can be viewed as suggestions for good clinical practice outside of clinical trials, to improve consistency of pathologic assessment of treatment response.
The recommendations were developed by the IASLC Pathology Committee in collaboration with an international multidisciplinary group of experts in medical oncology, thoracic surgery and radiology.
”We are crossing an exciting period of preclinical and clinical research around thoracic oncology. Targeted therapies and immunotherapy have greatly improved survival expectations in advanced disease and we believe they can equally generate benefit in the systemic therapy of earlier stages of the disease,” Scagliotti said in a statement. “Our initiative aims to use rigorous experimental conditions to analyze tissue specimens, collected in the context of already performed or ongoing neoadjuvant studies with targeted therapies and immunotherapy, to generate a diagnostic algorithm to be used in all subsequent studies in order to accelerate the scientific information about the clinical benefit produced by the neoadjuvant approach.”
