The results, to be reported simultaneously today at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2021 Congress and in a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, point to an important role for the drug, trastuzumab deruxtecan, in patients with this form of NSCLC, for which no targeted therapies are currently approved.

About 3% of nonsquamous NSCLCs have a mutation in HER2 (also known as ERBB2) – accounting for nearly 6,000 new cases annually in the United States. These tumors, which are more common in people who never smoked than those with a history of smoking, generally have a poor prognosis and frequently metastasize to the brain. While drugs that target the HER2 protein are used successfully in treating breast and gastric cancers with an oversupply of the protein, none has been approved for patients with NSCLC. Such patients, therefore, are generally treated with standard chemotherapy or immunotherapy, which has only limited effectiveness in patients who have already undergone previous treatment.

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