Squamous lung cancer, also known as squamous epithelial cell carcinoma of the lung, includes spindle cell carcinoma. Among all non-small cell lung cancers, treatment of squamous lung cancer is the most difficult. However, although the process is very difficult for the treatment of lung squamous carcinoma, there are targeted drugs to choose from.
Targeted drugs approved for lung cancer are currently available for EGFR, ALK, ROS1, BRAF, HER-2, VEGF, and other genes. According to research reported at the 2017 World Conference on Lung Cancer (WCLC) annual meeting, perhaps 10% of patients with squamous lung cancer are effective with targeted therapy. Although much lower than adenocarcinoma, this group of patients could potentially benefit from targeted therapy. For example, patients with EGFR mutations can be treated with gefitinib, erlotinib, erlotinib, axitinib, afatinib, ositinib; patients with ALK rearrangements or ROS1 fusions, RET fusion targets can be treated with crizotinib, cretinoin loratanib; c-MET amplified targets, crizotinib, cabozantinib.
Also, for squamous lung cancer, the FDA has approved 2 targeted agents for squamous lung cancer, ramolutumab and afatinib. Remolimumab, an anti-angiogenesis-based targeting agent that targets VEGFR2. In an international multicenter phase III clinical trial, ramolutumab combined with docetaxel reduced the risk of death by 14% and was not associated with lung adenocarcinoma or squamous lung cancer. Afatinib, also shown to improve overall survival time in patients with lung squamous cancer in a phase III clinical trial, resulted in FDA approval of afatinib in April 2016 for the treatment of patients with advanced lung squamous cancer that is resistant to first-line platinum-containing chemotherapy.