Hope With Answers: Living With Lung Cancer
Sep 17, 2026 · 17 min · 7 segments
Small cell lung cancer has historically had few treatment options — but that's changing fast. In this episode, thoracic oncologist Dr. Ashish Saxena (Weill Cornell Medicine) joins host and SCLC…
Ashish SaxenaGuest
Wendy BrooksHost
What are some of these newer treatment approaches giving researchers more hope today?
For a long time, sort of chemotherapy was the main treatment option and that really all there was.
And then sort of the most common Game-changing, I would say, treatment was the introduction of immunotherapy, which are treatments that we give that help your own immune system to also attack the cancer.
And that's where we started to make progress, harnessing the immune system to also kill the cancer cells, along with chemotherapy.
And now we're studying newer approaches to use different types of immunotherapies.
So not just what we typically have been using before, which were antibody drugs that block signals, that inhibit the immune system, but also now other treatments that maybe actually bring your immune cells directly to the cancer and help them directly kill cancer cells.
In addition to that, we're learning about proteins that these small cell lung cancers express that can be targets, not only for immune therapy, but for things like antibody drug conjugates, which are antibodies against a target that sort of bring a chemotherapy drug along with them to target the cancer a little more specifically.
So adding other things to immunotherapies like antibodies that may affect how blood vessels grow around the tumors, those combinations may also show better efficacy than what we've been doing.
So there's a lot of changes going in the landscape today, more than we've seen for a very long time.
As a limited stage small cell lung cancer person with my diagnosis, all that was really available for me at that time was chemotherapy and radiation.
And even immunotherapy at the limited stage wasn't introduced until just a couple of years ago.
And it gives us all tremendous hope, not just for me, but for everybody that's been diagnosed currently and those coming after.
What are some of these newer treatment approaches giving researchers more hope today?
For a long time, sort of chemotherapy was the main treatment option and that really all there was.
And then sort of the most common Game-changing, I would say, treatment was the introduction of immunotherapy, which are treatments that we give that help your own immune system to also attack the cancer.
And that's where we started to make progress, harnessing the immune system to also kill the cancer cells, along with chemotherapy.
And now we're studying newer approaches to use different types of immunotherapies.
So not just what we typically have been using before, which were antibody drugs that block signals, that inhibit the immune system, but also now other treatments that maybe actually bring your immune cells directly to the cancer and help them directly kill cancer cells.
In addition to that, we're learning about proteins that these small cell lung cancers express that can be targets, not only for immune therapy, but for things like antibody drug conjugates, which are antibodies against a target that sort of bring a chemotherapy drug along with them to target the cancer a little more specifically.
So adding other things to immunotherapies like antibodies that may affect how blood vessels grow around the tumors, those combinations may also show better efficacy than what we've been doing.
So there's a lot of changes going in the landscape today, more than we've seen for a very long time.
As a limited stage small cell lung cancer person with my diagnosis, all that was really available for me at that time was chemotherapy and radiation.
And even immunotherapy at the limited stage wasn't introduced until just a couple of years ago.
And it gives us all tremendous hope, not just for me, but for everybody that's been diagnosed currently and those coming after.
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