Basic Cancer Info

The next live webinar to be done through the partnership of GRACE and LUNGevity Foundation will be on the timely subject of using molecular features of a resected non-small cell lung cancer in order to better understand the probability of the cancer recurring. This will be on November 14th, 7 PM Eastern/4 PM Pacific, and will hope to answer the question, "Could these molecular features improve upon current staging efforts to help us refine our recommendations of which patients should receive post-operative chemotherapy in order to reduce the chance of recurrence?"

Here's the second half of the presentation by Dr. Gerard Silvestri, expert pulmonologist and critical care specialist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, on pulmonary complications from lung cancer treatment.

A post on About.com makes the case that screening the higher risk population of just those people 55-75 with a significant smoking history, as was done in the influential Na

It's been over two years since I reported the details from a positive trial for Abraxane (albumin-bound paclitaxel) as a weekly treatment combined with carboplatin and compared with standard "solvent-based" Taxol (paclitaxel) along with carboplatin.  While positive for showing a 8% difference in response rate, which was the primary endpoint, it didn't show a significant difference in overall survival (OS), as revealed in the

A few years ago, I reviewed a blood test called VeriStrat that evaluates the patterns of proteins in the blood and reports a profile of either “Good” (in about 2/3 of patients with advanced NSCLC) or “Poor” (in the remaining 1/3 of patients) for EGFR inhibitor therapy.

The last topic covered by Dr. Neal was on exciting work on molecular targets for squamous NSCLC.

We've been producing a series of podcasts from our Lung Cancer Highlights from ASCO 2012 webinar, featuring Drs.

Here is the second part of Dr. Socinski's summary from our ASCO Highlights in Lung Cancer program, covering an important presentation by Dr.

The lung surgeons I work with are competitive, and the patients they treat are better for it. They monitor how many lymph nodes they are able collect from the mediastinoscopies and lung cancer surgeries they do, competing against their own targets and each other. Why?

The response of cancers with a specific driver mutation , such as an EGFR mutation or ALK rearrangement, to a targeted inhibitor of that target, is often dramatic and long-lasting, but it is also almost always limited in duration, typically lasting several months or a few years.  Beyond that point, we tend to see a subset of the cancer cells become resistant progress, perhaps manifested as one or several  new lesions or growth of one area against a background of most of the remainder of the cancer still being well-controlled.