Doctors and researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) have identified a “new, rare type of small cell lung cancer that primarily affects younger people who have never smoked.”
Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is “relatively rare to begin with, accounting for 10% to 15% of all lung cancers,” and the newly discovered subtype “accounts for just a fraction of those. Out of 600 patients with SCLC whose cancers were analyzed for the study, only 20 people (or 3%) were found to have the rare subtype.”
Patients with this new subtype have intact copies of genes that are normally deactivated in SCLC. Instead, “most carried a signature ‘shattering’ of one or more of the chromosomes in their cancer cells, an event known as chromothripsis.” The research team dubbed the new type “atypical small cell lung carcinoma.”
The first patient the cancer center identified was “just 19 years old and not a smoker,” and upon looking at others with the subtype, the mean age at diagnosis was 53 compared to 70 for lung cancer diagnosis at large.
The analysis also revealed that “standard, first-line, platinum-based chemotherapies don’t work as well” to treat atypical SCLC. Patients with this subtype may benefit from “investigational drugs that target the unusual DNA structures that result from chromothripsis.”
