- First completed prospective biomarker-stratified validation study showing that VeriStrat may help guide 2nd-line treatment decisions for EGFR wild-type NSCLC
- Survival for patients with VeriStrat poor status is better with chemotherapy than with erlotinib
VeriStrat is a serum proteomic assay that was developed to identify which patients benefit from treatment with an EGFR TKI. This potentially practice-changing Phase III trial is the first prospectively validated study of this assay, and it documented the same short-term outcomes for the 70% of patients with VeriStrat “good” status whether they received erlotinib or single-agent chemotherapy (docetaxel). Patients with VeriStrat “poor” tumors had generally poorer outcomes but fared much better with chemotherapy. Given the oral administration and potentially more favorable tolerability profile of erlotinib compared to chemotherapy, it seems reasonable that this easy-to-obtain test might be useful in helping some patients with EGFR wild-type disease enjoy a break from cytotoxic therapy.
