Coral Olazagasti, MD

Cecilia Brown

Lung Cancers Today

Coral Olazagasti, MD, of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami, joined Lung Cancers Today to reflect on highlights from the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.She explained that she came back from the meeting feeling empowered and was thrilled to return to the clinic to share the news from the ASCO Annual Meeting with her patients.&ldquo;My patients, they love to hear about it,&rdquo; Dr. Olazagasti said. &ldquo;It just gives us hope to know &hellip; everyone&rsquo;s doing their best to make cancer a more treatable disease.&rdquo;The meeting included multiple sessions focusing on thoracic oncology, from early-stage to metastatic disease.&ldquo;The studies that I was most looking forward to mainly were the ones in the early stage or localized disease,&rdquo; Dr. Olazagasti said. &ldquo;One that I was excited about was CheckMate-816.&rdquo;<a href="https://www.lungcancerstoday.com/post/asco-2025-checkmate-816-shows-os-benefit-in-resectable-nsclc-with-5-year-follow-up">CheckMate-816</a>, which was presented as a late-breaking abstract by Patrick M. Forde, MD, of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University, is now the &ldquo;only neoadjuvant-only immunotherapy phase 3 trial to demonstrate a statistically and clinically significant&rdquo; 5-year overall survival (OS) benefit for a resectable solid tumor, study investigators explained.Dr. Olazagasti said that while this regimen is already approved and used in the clinic for certain patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the OS benefit is a critical finding.&ldquo;We can feel secure that this regimen actually works,&rdquo; she said.Beyond NSCLC, the meeting also featured critical updates in small cell lung cancer (SCLC), Dr. Olazagasti said. One of the &ldquo;practice-changing&rdquo; updates in SCLC was the <a href="https://www.lungcancerstoday.com/post/phase-3-imforte-trial-meets-primary-endpoints-of-os-and-pfs-in-extensive-stage-sclc">IMforte study</a>, which was presented by Luis G. Paz Ares, MD, PhD,&nbsp;of the 12 de Octubre University Hospital in Madrid, Spain.The phase 3 IMforte trial met its primary endpoints of OS and progression-free survival (PFS), demonstrating a &ldquo;clinically meaningful benefit&rdquo; of lurbinectedin plus atezolizumab as first-line maintenance treatment in patients with extensive-stage SCLC, according to the study investigators.&ldquo;Having a breakthrough in this aggressive and difficult-to-treat disease is always so inspiring and exciting,&rdquo; Dr. Olazagasti said.She said she was thrilled to share this news with her patients who are undergoing treatment for SCLC, explaining how it felt to watch patients react to the news.&ldquo;It makes this whole career and everything that we do meaningful because we want to see data change and we want to see the science progress, but ultimately, what we want to see is our patients live a better life, have a better quality of life, and hopefully a longer life,&rdquo; Dr. Olazagasti said. &ldquo;Being able to bring this data to the patient is so exciting.&rdquo;In addition to the IMforte trial, another major breakthrough in SCLC was reported at the ASCO Annual Meeting by Charles Rudin, MD, PhD, of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, who presented data from the <a href="https://www.lungcancerstoday.com/post/phase-3-dellphi-304-trial-shows-taralatamab-significantly-improves-os-pfs-in-previously-treated-sclc">phase 3 DeLLphi-304 trial</a> showing that taralatamab significantly improves OS and PFS in patients with previously treated SCLC.&ldquo;That perfectly adds now to the sequencing of events,&rdquo; Dr. Olazagasti said. &ldquo;Now we&rsquo;re moving lurbinectedin, that used to be used as a second-line, to the maintenance setting, but we&rsquo;re not leaving that space empty. We&rsquo;re filling it up with taralatamab; it&rsquo;s exciting to see how everything is falling into place.&rdquo;Although not all studies had positive readouts, Dr. Olazagasti explained that it&rsquo;s still important to pay attention to studies that did not perform as hoped.&ldquo;There&rsquo;s definitely value in the negative studies, to see where we are at the moment and what can we learn, and how can we incorporate those learning points into designing other further studies,&rdquo; she said.

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Thoracic oncology highlights and analysis from ASCO 2025, including CheckMate-816, IMforte, and DeLLphi-304 from Coral Olazagasti, MD, of the University of Miami.