News & Events: Early-stage NSCLC

"Looking at the genomic aspect of tumors allows us to get deeper than just looking at the microscopic appearance of the tumor and see how aggressive they are biologically," said Johannes Kratz, MD, FACS, director of minimally invasive and robotic thoracic surgery at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and coauthor of the study that was published in December 2019 in JAMA Network Open. "We can make a more accurate prediction of which patients will recur and better predict survival." Dr Kratz said that incorporating molecular analyses to determine patients' prognoses helps address [...]

Despite adoption of molecular biomarkers in the management of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the recently adopted 8th Edition staging utilized only clinicopathologic characteristics, and validated improvement in risk stratification of early-stage disease remains elusive. We therefore evaluated the integration of a clinically-validated molecular prognostic classifier into conventional staging.... Incorporation of a molecular prognostic classifier significantly improved identification of high-risk patients and survival predictions compared to conventional staging. TNMB may lead to [...]

Building on earlier retrospective validation studies, a team of Thoracic Oncology Program researchers, demonstrated in a small prospective study the clinical utility of a 14-gene expression assay in stratifying risk among non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. In a recently published paper in the journal Clinical Lung Cancer, lead author Gavitt Woodard, M.D., a general surgery research resident in the Thoracic Oncology Laboratory, and coauthors  David M. Jablons, M.D. (pictured second) and Michael Mann, M.D., (pictured 3rd) began  to address a key question regarding widespread use of [...]

Building on their  earlier work reported in The Lancet, two UCSF thoracic surgeons   David M. Jablons, M.D. (left) and   Michael Mann, M.D. (middle), and  Johannes Kratz, M.D. (right) a former surgical resident in the  Thoracic Oncology Lab, showed they could accurately stratify patients even with the earliest stage of lung cancer into groups at low-, intermediate- or high-risk of death based solely on the activity of 14 different genes found in their tumors. The group analyzed lung  tumors of patients diagnosed as Stage 1A  (T1a node-negative non-small-cell lung cancers (NSCLC)), the [...]

In the two largest clinical studies ever conducted on the molecular genetics of lung cancer, an international team, led by UCSF thoracic surgeons David M. Jablons, M.D. and Michael Mann, M.D., demonstrated that a 14-gene prognostic molecular assay better predicted the likelihood of death in early-stage lung cancer  patients versus conventional staging guidelines. Johannes Kratz, M.D., a former surgical resident in the  Thoracic Oncology Laboratory, helped spearhead the  development of the assay and was lead author of a paper published in The Lancet discussing the results. John Minna, M.D.", [...]