69 yo f came in with "some sob". Pt denies chest pain. She h | Figure 1
69 yo f came in with "some sob". Pt denies chest pain. She has a few things going on...any guesses?
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This is a bronchoscopic view of a smoker male of 50 presented with cough with bloody sputum. What is the tissue diagnosis in this case?
At ESMO 2025, Professor Li Zhang presented phase III OptiTROP-Lung04 results showing that sacituzumab tirumotecan significantly improved progression-free and overall survival versus platinum-based chemotherapy in patients with EGFR-mutated NSCLC who were resistant to tyrosine kinase inhibitors.
About 5% of non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) will be driven by a gene mutation known as anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK). Targeted treatments for those with advanced (not curable) ALK‐mutated NSCLC cancer have been developed and found to be more effective than chemotherapy. The first ALK inhibitor to be developed was crizotinib. Newer ALK‐targeted drugs have also been developed and include ceritinib, alectinib, brigatinib, ensartinib, and lorlatinib. In this review we looked at treatments that target ALK‐mutated NSCLC to find out how well they work. We found 11 studies (2874 participants): six studies compared an ALK‐targeted drug to chemotherapy, and five studies compared a newer ALK‐targeted drug to crizotinib. The studies were conducted in people with advanced ALK‐mutated NSCLC using these drugs as their first or later treatment. A total of five different ALK inhibitors were used across studies: alectinib, brigatinib, ceritinib, crizotinib, and lorlatinib. Results People treated with ALK‐targeted drugs lived longer without their cancer growing than those on chemotherapy. These improvements were also seen in people with cancer that had spread to the brain. People receiving ALK‐targeted drugs lived longer overall, even when some had received chemotherapy first. ALK‐targeted drugs cause a similar number of side effects as chemotherapy. ALK‐targeted drugs caused more tumours to reduce in size and resulted in a longer time until worsening of symptoms when compared to chemotherapy. People treated with newer ALK‐targeted drugs lived longer without their cancer growing than those receiving crizotinib, including in people with cancer involving the brain. People treated with newer ALK‐targeted drugs as first treatment were likely to live longer overall with a similar number of overall side effects. Newer ALK‐targeted drugs caused more tumours to reduce in size when compared to crizotinib. The evidence for most reported measures was of moderate or high certainty. Conclusions The best first treatment for people with incurable ALK‐mutated lung cancer is a newer ALK inhibitor such as alectinib, brigatinib, ceritinib, or lorlatinib. More studies are needed to determine which of these options is best and what treatment should be used when the cancer grows after these medicines have been given.