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Occasionally in a stage four setting, you’ll have such good control, or if you had a curative approach to your lung cancer and something comes back new. In either of those cases, you can have a small lesion that looks pretty suspicious for a relapse or recurrence of the lung cancer or, despite everything else under control in your stage four setting, a new colony that seems to escape the way that your current drug is treating the rest of your cancer. In either of these circumstances, you can elect for something called SBRT or stereotactic radiation.
And a radiation oncologist can go and basically deliver a very focal, concentrated radiation that has very little symptoms and nuke that whole area or colony, because you’re worried that it’s behaving differently than the rest of your original lung cancer that’s responding to therapy, or because you had a recurrence that’s hard to get from a biopsy, hard to remove with surgery and you feel more comfortable treating it definitively by radiation. The problem with this is if you do elect for that and you didn’t get a biopsy, you’ll never quite know if it was indeed cancer or the new mutations it may have had.
