Local ablative therapy in oncogenic-driven oligometastatic non-small cell lung cancer: present and ongoing strategies—a narrative review

Oligometastatic (OM) disease is defined by a low metastatic tumor spread. OM non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treatment aims to improve the patient’s prognosis and quality of life, in an attempt-to-cure objective. Oncogenic-driven metastatic NSCLC accounts for about 20–25% of NSCLCs, with an ever-increasing number of potentially druggable molecular alterations. Due to specific targeted therapy, the care and prognosis of mutated NSCLC is quite different from non-oncogenic-driven NSCLC. However, OM-NSCLC treatment guidelines do not specifically discuss oncogenic-driven OM-NSCLC patients. We conducted a narrative review regarding retrospective and prospective studies published from inception to May 2020 dealing with oncogenic-driven OM-NSCLC in order to: (I) describe the specific patterns of metastatic spread of oncogenic-driven NSCLC (i.e., bone and pleural tropism in EGFR mutated NSCLC and serous and brain metastases in ALK NSCLC); (II) review the low level of current evidence for local ablative therapy (LAT) strategies in patients with oncogenic-driven OM-NSCLC, focusing on the benefit/risk of tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKI) and LATs combination and (III) present strategies to help to select the best candidate for an attempt-to-cure approach. Finally, the optimal strategy may be to introduce a targeted therapy, then treat all tumor sites with LAT, and finally continue TKI for unknown prolonged duration in an attempt to prolong progression free survival in most patients, improve overall survival for some patients, and potentially lead to a cancer cure for a few patients.