Eight months longer: a two-drug pairing is rewriting the outlook for the most aggressive lung cancer

Small cell lung cancer that has spread is among the hardest cancers to treat, and progress has been slow for decades. In the Phase 3 DeLLphi-305 trial, presented by Dana-Farber's Jacob Sands at the ESMO congress in Madrid on October 24 and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, adding tarlatamab — a drug that physically links immune cells to cancer cells — to durvalumab as maintenance therapy extended median survival by more than eight months, more than tripled the time before the disease progressed, and cut the risk of death by 58% compared with durvalumab alone. The benefit held even for patients whose cancer had spread to the brain or liver. 'This trial is positive in every way,' Sands said.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation