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Lung Cancer Dream Team Makes Progress

Sandy McDowell | Managing Editor Research

More than 2 years ago, the American Cancer Society and Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) formed a Lung Cancer Dream Team and charged it with the mission of finding a new or more effective treatment for a hard-to-treat type of lung cancer that has a mutation in a gene called KRAS (KAY-rass).

In this interview, ?a coleader on the team, provides a high-level overview of what they have learned so far, the clinical trials they’re running, and their hope for the future. J?nne is 1 of the 3 coleaders for the Lung Cancer Dream Team. He’s a clinician and researcher at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

"This is where we're really leveraging the power of the Dream?Team group,”?J?nne explains. “We’re able to pool our resources. So now, we can look at hundreds and hundreds of patients treated with immunotherapy to learn why some patients respond and some don’t.” It’s more than any single institution could study. “By pooling our numbers, we have the power to answer some questions. It’s been a very successful effort as a part of this grant,” he says. “And it’s ongoing.”

Q. What are you learning about putting the 2 types of treatment together?

A.?This is the 3rd?goal of the study, “to understand if there’s an interaction between immunotherapy and inhibiting the signals of KRAS directly through targeted therapy,” J?nne says. “We hope there’s an intersection between them. But we don’t know. That’s why we’re testing.” They have already started clinical trials combining inhibitors of KRAS signaling and immunotherapy, he says.

“These things take longer than any of us want them to take,” he says. “I think we’ve already strengthened our scientific understanding about KRAS over the course of this grant so far. It remains to be seen whether we’ll have new treatment approaches that merge immunotherapy with targeted therapy ready for clinical trials by the end of the grant, or 1 to 2 years after the grant. Either way, we’ll succeed at our goal of advancing the therapy for this subclass of lung cancer patients,” he says.

Q. How does the team work together?

A.?All 8 of the institutions work on all 3 of the project’s goals – improving targeted therapy, better understanding how immunotherapy works, and trying to combine the two treatments. But some groups spend more time on one goal than another, J?nne says. “We have multiple project managers to make sure we’re keeping up with all the schedules,” he says. “The operational aspect has been critical. We have teleconferences or bigger meetings in person to bring ideas together. We also have subgroup meetings that allow us to be more focused.”?

Q. Would you like to see the work of the Dream Team to continue as a group after this grant ends?

A. “There’s a certain activation energy that is needed to start working together and seeing results. We have that momentum going now, so why stop? But we do need to find a way to fund that, so we can, hopefully continue to make discoveries and translate them into new treatments for patients with KRAS-mutant lung cancers.”??

About the Dream Team

The Mission:?To be able to offer people with lung tumors that have a KRAS gene mutation?targeted therapies,?immunotherapy, or a combination of them.?

Who’s Involved:?Led by Jedd Wolchok, MD, PhD,?Pasi J?nne, MD, PhD, and?Alice Shaw, MD, PhD. J?nne and Shaw replaced co-leader Jeffrey Engleman, MD, PhD, when he took a job in the private sector. The team includes more than 35 specialists from these 8 institutions with the largest lung cancer research programs in the United States:

  • Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston
  • Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at The University of California San Francisco
  • ?Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston
  • MD Anderson Cancer Center at The University of Texas in Houston
  • Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore
  • Taussig Cancer Institute at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio
  • University of California Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center in Sacramento
  • Yale Cancer Center in New Haven, Connecticut

How’s It Funded:?By a 20 million dollar grant co-funded by the American Cancer Society and SU2C, a charitable program of the Entertainment Industry Foundation that raises funds to speed the pace of cancer research.

Their Grant Period:?April 2015 to September 2018