Management of advanced non-small cell lung cancers with known mutations or rearrangements: latest evidence and treatment approaches

Abstract

Precision oncology is now the evidence-based standard of care for the management of many advanced non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLCs). Expert consensus has defined minimum requirements for routine testing and identification of epidermal growth factor (EGFR) mutations (15% of tumors harbor EGFR exon 19 deletions or exon 21 L858R substitutions) and anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) rearrangements (5% of tumors) in advanced lung adenocarcinomas (ACs). Application of palliative targeted therapies with oral tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) in advanced/metastatic lung ACs harboring abnormalities in EGFR (gefitinib, erlotinib, afatinib) and ALK/ROS1/MET (crizotinib) has consistently led to more favorable outcomes compared with traditional cytotoxic agents. In addition, mutations leading to resistance to first-line EGFR and ALK TKIs can now be successfully inhibited by soon to be approved third-generation EGFR TKIs (osimertinib, rociletinib) and second-generation ALK TKIs (ceritinib, alectinib). Notably, increasing feasibility, accessibility, and application of molecular profiling technologies has permitted dynamic growth in the identification of actionable driver oncogenes. Emerging genomic aberrations for which TKIs have shown impressive results in clinical trials and expansion of drug labels for approved agents are awaited include ROS1 rearrangements (1-2% of tumors, drug: crizotinib) and BRAF-V600E mutations (1-3% of tumors, drugs: vemurafenib, dafrafenib + trametinib). Evolving genomic events in which TKI responses have been reported in smaller series include MET exon 14 skipping mutations (2-4% of tumors, drug: crizotinib); high-level MET amplification (1-2% of tumors, drug: crizotinib); RET rearrangements (1% of tumors, drug: cabozantinib); and ERBB2 mutations (2-3% of tumors, drug: afatinib), among others. Unfortunately, the most common genomic event in NSCLC, KRAS mutations (25-30% of tumors), is not targetable with approved or in development small molecule inhibitors. Here, we review currently approved, emerging, and evolving systemic precision therapies matched with their driver oncogenes for the management of advanced NSCLC.

Keywords: adenocarcinoma; anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK); c-ros oncogene 1 (ROS1); epidermal growth factor (EGFR); mesenchymal epithelial transition factor proto-oncogene (MET); non-small cell lung cancer; precision oncology; raf murine sarcoma viral oncogene homolog B1 (BRAF); rearranged during transfection (RET); targeted therapies.

Figure 1.

Pie chart with known mutually exclusive genomic events in lung adenocarcinoma. Highlighted in different colors are the driver oncogenes that function as predictive biomarkers for approved, emerging, evolving and future precision therapies with kinase inhibitors. ALK, anaplastic lymphoma kinase; BRAF, serine/threonine-protein kinase B-raf; EGFR, epidermal growth factor; ERBB2, erb-B2 receptor tyrosine kinase 2; FGFR, fibroblast growth factor receptor; HRAS, harvey rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog; KRAS, v-ki-ras2 kirsten rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog; MAP2K1, mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase 1; MET, mesenchymal epithelial transition factor proto-oncogene; NF1, neurofibromin 1; NRAS, neuroblastoma RAS viral oncogene homolog; NTRK1, neurotrophic tyrosine kinase, receptor, type 1; RET, rearranged during transfection; RIT1, ras-like without CAAX 1; ROS1, c-ros oncogene 1.