We're about to get some key lung cancer data — and it could affect how hundreds of thousands of cancer patients are treated (MRK, BMS, RHHBY)

On Monday, three big players in the growing field of cancer immunotherapy are sharing data that could change how we treat lung cancer.
The three companies, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck, and Roche, are looking at how their immunotherapies, known as checkpoint inhibitors, can be used in combination — either with other immunotherapy or with chemotherapy to treat advanced non-small cell lung cancer.
Here's what to expect when the data comes out Monday morning at the American Association of Cancer Research's annual meeting.

Three pharmaceutical companies are about to release data that could change how we treat lung cancer.

Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck, and Roche, are looking at how their drugs can be used to treat advanced non-small cell lung cancer.

The trials focus on how effective combinations that leverage certain immunotherapies known as checkpoint inhibitors can be in treating it. According to the American Cancer Society, there are about 234,000 new cases of lung cancer each year. Around 80% to 85% of those cases are a type of lung cancer called non-small cell lung cancer. Overall, lung cancer is the second-most common cancer next to breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men.

The data will be presented Monday morning at the American Association of Cancer Research's annual meeting.

The goal will be to show that these treatments can increase the overall survival in patients with advanced lung cancer before it's treated with anything else. If that's the case, it could change the way cancer doctors across the US treat lung cancer.

"It's providing a lot more hope and options for patients of getting better survival benefits when they're diagnosed with this very serious disease that impacts so many people," Jill O'Donnell Tormey, CEO of the Cancer Research Institute, which has been exploring cancer immunotherapy for decades, told Business Insider.

Bristol-Myers Squibb, Checkmate 227:
the company showed
new biomarker called tumor mutation burden. The idea is that the more mutations a tumor has, the more likely the immune system will be able to recognize it and go after it. In lung cancer patients who had high TMB (45% of the patients in the trial qualified), the treatment was considered superior to chemotherapy in keeping cancer from progressing.
Merck, Keynote-189:
already got FDA approval
Roche, Impower 150:
In March

On Monday, we'll get a better picture of what that means as far as how much longer patients were able to live (known as overall survival), as well as how long they were able to go on the treatment before their cancer started to get worse (something known as progression-free survival).

We'll also get a sense of something known as the "hazard ratio." The hazard ratio stacks survival of patients on one arm of the trial compared to the other. So if the ratio is less than one, it means that the immunotherapy-based regimen had better survival than the chemotherapy-only arm.

Already though, the summaries of the results has O'Donnell Tormey optimistic about what it'll mean for lung cancer patients.

"I guess people are going to have options," she said.

And ideally that will spread out beyond just academic medical centers to hospitals across the country that see the majority of patients.

"To me, that's going to be the true game changer for patients," O'Donnell Tormey said.

We're about to get some key lung cancer data — and it could affect how hundreds of thousands of cancer patients are treated (MRK, BMS, RHHBY)

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