For your doctor to build a treatment plan with you, it’s important that they know as much about your cancer as possible. So your doctor will make sure that you have various tests and scans.
To test for the ROS1 gene, you will probably need a biopsy. You can learn more about biopsies here.
If you’d like to learn more about how changes to your genes can cause cancer, click here.
Once you have learned that you have ROS1 NSCLC, you might start to wonder about how that affects your prognosis. But cancer is a very complicated disease, and many factors can play a part in how it starts and keeps growing. Because of this, it’s hard for a doctor to give anybody an exact amount of time. Factors that can affect your prognosis include:
It’s worth knowing that ROS1+ NSCLC is considered a fairly aggressive cancer compared with other forms of NSCLC – four out of 10 people are diagnosed after the cancer has already spread to their brain.18 With regular chemotherapy, about half of people with ROS1+ NSCLC pass away around 2 years after their diagnosis.19
However, recent research has led to the discovery of treatments called ‘ROS1 inhibitors’, which are specifically designed to treat ROS1+ NSCLC.20
Clinical trials have shown that ROS1 inhibitors can help increase the time that somebody can live with ROS1+ NSCLC. Recent trials have shown that the tumours of most people with ROS1 NSCLC get smaller with a ROS1+ inhibitor treatment. And half of people are still alive and living with their cancer up to 4 years after diagnosis.20