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More than 2 years ago, the American Cancer Society and Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) formed a Lung Cancer Dream Team and charged it with the mission of finding a new or more effective treatment for a hard-to-treat type of lung cancer that has a mutation in a gene called KRAS (KAY-rass).

In this interview, ?a coleader on the team, provides a high-level overview of what they have learned so far, the clinical trials they¡¯re running, and their hope for the future. J?nne is 1 of the 3 coleaders for the Lung Cancer Dream Team. He¡¯s a clinician and researcher at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

"This is where we're really leveraging the power of the Dream?Team group,¡±?J?nne explains. ¡°We¡¯re able to pool our resources. So now, we can look at hundreds and hundreds of patients treated with immunotherapy to learn why some patients respond and some don¡¯t.¡± It¡¯s more than any single institution could study. ¡°By pooling our numbers, we have the power to answer some questions. It¡¯s been a very successful effort as a part of this grant,¡± he says. ¡°And it¡¯s ongoing.¡±

Q. What are you learning about putting the 2 types of treatment together?

A.?This is the 3rd?goal of the study, ¡°to understand if there¡¯s an interaction between immunotherapy and inhibiting the signals of KRAS directly through targeted therapy,¡± J?nne says. ¡°We hope there¡¯s an intersection between them. But we don¡¯t know. That¡¯s why we¡¯re testing.¡± They have already started clinical trials combining inhibitors of KRAS signaling and immunotherapy, he says.

¡°These things take longer than any of us want them to take,¡± he says. ¡°I think we¡¯ve already strengthened our scientific understanding about KRAS over the course of this grant so far. It remains to be seen whether we¡¯ll have new treatment approaches that merge immunotherapy with targeted therapy ready for clinical trials by the end of the grant, or 1 to 2 years after the grant. Either way, we¡¯ll succeed at our goal of advancing the therapy for this subclass of lung cancer patients,¡± he says.

Q. How does the team work together?

A.?All 8 of the institutions work on all 3 of the project¡¯s goals ¨C improving targeted therapy, better understanding how immunotherapy works, and trying to combine the two treatments. But some groups spend more time on one goal than another, J?nne says. ¡°We have multiple project managers to make sure we¡¯re keeping up with all the schedules,¡± he says. ¡°The operational aspect has been critical. We have teleconferences or bigger meetings in person to bring ideas together. We also have subgroup meetings that allow us to be more focused.¡±?

Q. Would you like to see the work of the Dream Team to continue as a group after this grant ends?

A. ¡°There¡¯s a certain activation energy that is needed to start working together and seeing results. We have that momentum going now, so why stop? But we do need to find a way to fund that, so we can, hopefully continue to make discoveries and translate them into new treatments for patients with KRAS-mutant lung cancers.¡±??