A Phase II Trial of Sunitinib in Never-smokers With Lung Adenocarcinoma: Identification of Oncogenic Alterations Underlying Sunitinib Sensitivity

This research study is a Phase II clinical trial, which tests the safety and effectiveness of an investigational drug to learn whether the drug works in treating a specific cancer. Investigational means that the drug is being studied. It also means that the FDA has not yet approved sunitinib for your type of cancer. Sunitinib has been approved by the FDA for treatment of gastrointestinal stromal tumors, advanced renal cell carcinoma and advanced pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors. While most chemotherapies work by interfering with cancer cell replication, sunitinib works by blocking certain protein signals within the cell. Because sunitinib works differently from standard intravenous chemotherapies, we call it a targeted therapy. This drug has also been used in other research studies and information from those other research studies suggests that this agent may help to slow the growth of some NSCLC tumors. In this research study, we are looking to see if sunitinib may stop certain NSCLC tumors from growing. The study focuses on a type of NSCLC, adenocarcinoma, which has previously been found to be more sensitive to other kinds of oral targeted therapies. This study will focus specifically on (1) adenocarcinoma tumors that do not carry a mutation in a known cancer gene (EGFR, KRAS, or ALK) and occur in patients that never smoked (less than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime) or (2) adenocarcinoma tumors that have a mutation in the RET gene.