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Lung cancer is the second most common type of cancer in women in the USA, and almost 60,000 women died of lung cancer in 2024 – more than any other cancer.
Progresses in a way to find and treat lung cancer have helped us make progress, but more still have to be done. While 1 of 4 cancer deaths come from lung cancer, fewer than 1 out of 10 Federal Cancer Research are awarded scholarships to finance lung cancer.
“Lung cancer was an illness that has achieved pretty bad results and unfortunately not much hope,” said Nan Sethakorn, Md, Ph.D., medical oncologist and assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago. There must be more education and awareness of recent lung cancer treatments, ”she added.
Read: Lung cancer treatment: Next steps after diagnosis >>
The anamnesis of immunotherapy as lung cancer treatment
Immunotherapy is a kind of cancer treatment that uses your body’s immune system to kill cancer cells, and it helps some people with lung cancer to live longer. According to Sethakorn, immunotherapy has played an important role in cancer treatment in recent years.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the field of immunobiology took shape and built research that began a few decades earlier and pointed out that the immune system plays a role in cancer growth. But Sethakorn said that only in the early 2000s modern immunotherapies such as Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) came into the picture.
Immunter therapies were approved for those who had already been treated with standard chemotherapy but had returned their cancer. The researchers saw such successful results in immunotherapy that the next step was able to offer people as their first treatment for lung cancer.
This also made possible success, and immunotherapy was used as a first line treatment for lung cancer even in advanced stages and is now used to treat lung cancer stages in early stages.
“It is pretty humiliating and looks back on all the different groups that made this basic immunobiology research,” said Sethakorn. “We have achieved astonishing results with more effective medication such as these immunotherapies – but that took several decades.”
Differences in lung cancer financing
Unfortunately, the five-year survival rate for lung cancer is the percentage of people who have a little more than 1 of 4 (26.7%) five years after the diagnosis of cancer.
According to a study in 2024 in the JCO Oncology Practice, many types of cancer with high incidence and mortality rates are underfunded. ” In 2019, lung cancer research received grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) around 300 million US dollars. Although this sounds a lot, it is extremely expensive to carry out research and clinical studies. And in order to be able to put the amount into perspective: 300 million US dollars were less than half of the quantity, the prostate and breast cancer spots were financed. Breast cancer, for example, causes 15% of cancer deaths, but receives over 20% of the research funds.
Inequalities in relation to the diversity of research participants are also a topic in clinical studies and clinical results for lung cancer research.
The Pragmatica-Lung study is working on optimizing the design of clinical studies as a result of the efforts of the NIH and the FDA to reduce obstacles to the inclusion of studies by making it easier for patients to enroll. It is easier for researchers to carry out studies and increase the variety of participants. “The enrollment of groups that were historically underrepresented, such as black, female and Hispanic patients, rather correspond to the cancer rates in these groups,” said Sethakorn.
Patient lawyers are working on improving lung cancer research
Another means of reducing differences in the financing of lung cancer is the work of patient representative groups. Patients who are often referred to as peer reviewers discuss the advantages, concerns and treatment of a study. “Our task is to represent the needs and voices of our cancer groups,” said Christina Sisti, DPS, MPH, a cancer patient.
Sisti talks to others in the cancer community about clinical studies and how people can take part. “I found that the Ministry of Defense and the National Cancer Institute have active opportunities for the patient’s advocacy,” said Sisti. The first step to become a lawyer for patient research added to her to fill out the forms on her websites.
Find clinical studies and registrations on lung cancer
According to Sethakorn, clinical studies enable early access to promising new therapies that have not yet been approved by the FDA. “As a medical research community, we start to understand how effective treatment can be and what side effects we have to respect.”
Registria, a different kind of medical research, do not offer new treatments or medical devices. Instead, they focus on the characteristics and information about people in whom cancer is diagnosed. For example, you can help answer questions about certain types of lung cancer that affect women differently than in men.
Ask your oncologists about clinical studies that could fit well. You can often tell you about all attempts that are currently recruiting participants. You can also search Clinicaltrials.gov. Patient representative groups or organizations such as the American Lung Association or the American Cancer Society also have resources to combine people with clinical studies.
This educational resource was created with the support of Daiichi Sankyo.
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