2025 Year in Review: Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

In 2025, ESMO Open published 6-year data for the CheckMate 9LA trial, which continued to show overall survival benefits for patients with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who had received nivolumab (Opdivo) and ipilimumab (Yervoy) inhibition plus chemotherapy. Long-term data showed the combination had a striking benefit over chemotherapy alone for patients whose tumors were PD-L1 <1%, which are hard to treat. In other developments, FDA approved subcutaneous formulations of both nivolumab and pembrolizumab (Keytruda), and phase 2 data showed frontline treatment with izalontamab brengitecan plus osimertinib (Tagrisso) induced responses in 100% of patients with EGFR-mutated, locally advanced or metastatic NSCLC.