Lung Cancer

The debate over screening for lung cancer continues. While there have been many advances in treatment for late-stage disease, screening and prevention are likely the most cost effective and best approaches to preventing lung cancer deaths.

Treatment of patients with locally advanced or metastatic non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that is anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive as detected by an FDA-approved test.

Maintenance therapy with bevacizumab following combination therapy with bevacizumab, pemetrexed, and carboplatin could be an effective treatment for patients with advanced, nonsquamous non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to a new study.

The American Lung Association recently released new guidelines for lung cancer screening, recommending low-dose computed tomography screening in high-risk smokers.

Body mass index appears to be inversely associated with the risk for lung cancer, even after smoking status is carefully taken into account. A new prospective study found this association was restricted to current and former smokers and was actually stronger after adjustments for smoking were made.

Scotland will soon begin a large prospective trial of early screening for lung cancer in high-risk patients using a simple blood test. The test, called EarlyCDT-Lung, has been in use and trials in the United States for more than two years.

Addition of a Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) inhibitor to therapies that target commonly altered oncogenes such as KRAS or EGFR could improve clinical outcomes for patients with non–small cell-lung cancer.

Using detailed patient data and mathematical modeling programs, a US–international team of investigators has concluded that in the US, public health efforts beginning in the 1950s prevented nearly 800,000 deaths from lung cancer between 1975 and 2000.

In this review, the authors discuss past attempts at lung cancer screening, the results of the National Lung Cancer Screening Trial, and innovative tests for lung cancer screening currently being evaluated.

Tanner et al provide a concise review of lung cancer screening, including discussion of past failed attempts, the success of the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST), and promising new avenues for improving on the NLST results.

Screening is always an issue that generates a great deal of emotion, as recently seen with the controversies surrounding mammography and prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing.

A new finding suggests that inhibiting the cytokine interleukin-17A, produced by inflammatory cells of the immune system, may be a novel approach in the treatment of lung tumors.

A study has identified a gene fusion from a never-smoker lung cancer patient that may act as a driver in a subset of lung cancer cases. The results suggest that the newly identified fusion is not that rare and that the mutation exists in primary lung adenocarcinomas.

The past year in oncology was highlighted by the continuation of breakthroughs in targeted therapies-with new treatments receiving US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), lymphoma, and melanoma.

A trial of 154,901 participants between the ages of 55 and 74 sought to address whether chest radiographs as lung cancer screenings affect lung cancer incidence and mortality rates from lung cancer.

of a prospective biomarker analysis for the phase III SATURN trial in NSCLC patients taking erlotinib as maintenance therapy now show that those with activating EGFR mutations had extended progression-free survival compared to patients with KRAS mutations.

Researchers have discovered that individuals carrying a mutation in the BAP1 gene are at greater risk of developing mesothelioma and uveal melanoma.

Scientists at Jennerex, Inc. in San Francisco, and collaborators from University of Pennsylvania and the University of Ottawa in Canada have just engineered a poxvirus, JX-594, to selectively replicate in tumor cells that have an activated EGFR/ Ras pathway, but not in normal tissue.

The FDA has approved crizotinib (Xalkori) for the treatment of late-stage non–small-cell lung cancer patients who express the abnormal anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene.

Dr. Ramaswamy Govindan, Washington U at St. Louis, discusses patient screening, new research in targeted therapies, as well as the continued role of traditional chemotherapy in lung cancer.

The NCI has released the results of the almost 10-year National Lung Screening Trial (NLST), which compared two lung cancer-detecting techniques: low dose computed tomography (CT), known as spiral CT, and standard chest X-ray.

A recent NCI study has shown that men have higher cancer mortality rates than do women. The study systematically extracted data from the SEER Database of the NCI, analyzing 29 years of survival statistics data (ending in 2006) from 36 different cancers across the United States.

A study in the AACR journal Cancer Prevention Research, has shown evidence that celecoxib, a cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) inhibitor, may be a potent chemopreventive agent for lung cancer.

When I heard about the FDA’s dramatic new step in the anti-smoking fight, I couldn’t help but wonder if it would really make a difference. The new measure requires tobacco companies to add gruesome images to cigarette packages; the images include a corpse, a person’s chest stitched together following heart surgery and even a man with smoke drifting through a hole in this throat.

In this exclusive video, Dr. Harvey Pass discusses surgery in mesothelioma of the pleura and other areas of disagreement.

Results from an ongoing Phase II trial of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that harbor a specific mutation in the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene reported at ASCO.

Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. Ongoing research into the molecular basis of lung cancer has yielded insight into various critical pathways that are deregulated in lung tumorigenesis, and in particular key driver mutations integral to cancer cell survival and proliferation.

In 2004, Dr. Thomas Lynch[1] and others[2] first reported the presence of somatic mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene in patients who exhibited great sensitivity to EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs).

The authors of "ALK-Targeted Therapy for Lung Cancer: Ready for Prime Time," in this issue of ONCOLOGY, address the newest developments in the field of targeted therapies for advanced non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Weill Medical School of Cornell University have shown an association of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations among tumor samples from men and those who smoke cigarettes.