The Oncology Forum: Experts Answer Major Questions About Immunotherapy in NSCLC

Sanjay Juneja, MD, partnered with Formedics to host the Oncology Forum during the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, kicking off the robust discussion with the lung cancer panel.

The expert panel featured Stephen Liu, MD, of Georgetown University, Millie Das, MD, of Stanford University, and Eric Singhi, MD, of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Dr. Juneja initiated the Q&A portion of the discussion by asking the question, ‘why should you continue with adjuvant immunotherapy in a patient who achieved a pathological complete response (pCR) after receiving neoadjuvant immunotherapy plus chemotherapy followed by surgery?’

“I think what we’ve seen of the neoadjuvant studies, looking at CheckMate 816 and all of the trials, if you achieve a pathologic complete response with immunotherapy and chemotherapy, then you do very well,” Dr. Liu answered. “It’s unclear how much the immunotherapy after surgery is contributing. Is it helping at all? Is it hurting at all? There are studies that will answer that question, but we don’t have those yet. What we need to do, what all of us do, is make decisions in the absence of data with extrapolation.”

Dr. Liu also addressed the importance of maintaining open lines of communication to determine the next best course of treatment by initiating these important discussions with patients.

“I think the use of immunotherapy after path CR is probably less important, but where I would absolutely continue it, I think the PD-L1-negative group, they do consistently pretty poorly,” he concluded. “As long as someone’s tolerating [the therapy], and if the patients are not comfortable stopping, I’m not comfortable stopping. You mentioned humility before. I acknowledge that we don’t know the answer to this, so we have a discussion with the patient. As long as it’s not doing harm, I feel comfortable with it. Is it absolutely necessary? I don’t think we know the answer to that yet.”