Lung cancer is the second most common type of cancer found in women in the U.S. And almost 60,000 women died from lung cancer in 2024 — more than any other cancer.
Advances in ways to find and treat lung cancer have helped us make progress, but more still needs to be done. While 1 in 4 cancer deaths are from lung cancer, less than 1 in 10 federal cancer research grants are given to fund lung cancer.
“Lung cancer has been a disease that has had pretty poor outcomes and unfortunately, not a lot of hope,” explained Nan Sethakorn, M.D., Ph.D., a medical oncologist and assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago. There needs to be more education and awareness about the newer lung cancer treatments available,” she added.
Read: Lung Cancer Treatment: Next Steps After Diagnosis >>
Immunotherapy’s history as a lung cancer treatment
Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses your body’s immune system to kill cancer cells and it helps some people with lung cancer live longer. According to Sethakorn, immunotherapy has played a major role in cancer treatment in recent years.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the field of immunobiology was taking shape, building off research that began several decades earlier that suggested that the immune system plays a role in cancer growth. But Sethakorn said it wasn’t until the early 2000s that the modern immunotherapies we’re familiar with such as pembrolizumab (Keytruda) came into the picture.
Immunotherapies were approved for those who had already been treated with standard chemotherapy but had their cancer return. Researchers saw such successful outcomes of immunotherapy that the next step was to give it to people as their initial treatment for lung cancer.
That too saw success, and immunotherapy was used as a first-line treatment for lung cancer, even in advanced stages, and it's now being used to treat early stages of lung cancer.
“It’s quite humbling, looking back into all the different groups that did this fundamental immunobiology research,” said Sethakorn. “We’ve had amazing results with using more effective drugs, like these immunotherapies — but that took several decades.”
Disparities in lung cancer funding
Unfortunately, the five-year survival rate for lung cancer — the percentage of people who are alive five years after being diagnosed with cancer — is only slightly more than 1 in 4 (26.7%).
According to a 2024 study in the journal JCO Oncology Practice, “Many cancers with high incidence and mortality rates are underfunded.” Lung cancer research received about $300 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2019. Although that may sound like a lot, it's extremely expensive to conduct research and clinical trials. And to put the amount into perspective: $300 million was less than half the amount that funds prostate and breast cancer sites. Breast cancer, for example, causes 15% of cancer deaths, but gets over 20% of research funds.
Inequities in diversity of research participants are also an issue both in clinical trials and clinical outcomes for lung cancer research.
The Pragmatica-Lung trial is working to streamline the design of clinical trials as a result of efforts by the NIH and the FDA to reduce barriers to trial enrollment by making it easier for patients to enroll, easier for researchers to conduct trials and increasing the diversity of participants. “Enrollment of groups that have historically been underrepresented, such as Black, female and Hispanic patients, are more in line with the rates of cancer in these groups,” explained Sethakorn.
Patient advocates work to improve lung cancer research
Another means of reducing disparities in lung cancer funding is the work from patient advocacy groups. Patient advocates, often referred to as peer reviewers, discuss a study’s benefits, concerns and what treatment entails. “Our job is to represent the needs and voices of our cancer groups,” said Christina Sisti, DPS, MPH, a cancer patient advocate.
Sisti talks to others in the cancer community about clinical trials and how people can participate. “I found the Department of Defense and the National Cancer Institute have active research patient advocacy opportunities,” said Sisti. The first step in becoming a patient research advocate, she added, was completing forms on their websites.
Finding lung cancer clinical trials and registries
Clinical trials give early access to promising new therapies not yet approved by the FDA, according to Sethakorn. “It’s how we as a medical research community begin to understand how effective a treatment can be, and what side effects we’ll have to watch out for.”
Registries, a different type of medical research, don’t offer new treatments or medical devices. Instead, they focus on the characteristics and information about people who are diagnosed with cancer. For example, they can help answer questions about certain types of lung cancer affecting women differently than in men.
Ask your oncologist about clinical trials that might be a good fit. They can often tell you about any trials currently recruiting participants. You can also search ClinicalTrials.gov. Patient advocacy groups or organizations such as the American Lung Association or American Cancer Society also have resources to connect people to clinical trials.
Resources
American Cancer Society Clinical Trials
American Lung Association Clinical Trial Finder
This educational resource was created with support from Daiichi Sankyo.
