I'm very pleased to offer the podcast materials for the recent webinar by Dr. Mark Socinski, medical oncologist and leader of the excellent Thoracic Oncology Program at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill. He's been a long-time leader of the entire field of lung cancer for many years, and he's among the best at synthesizing new information into a cogent perspective.

Here is the audio and video versions of the podcast, along with the figures and transcript that go with the program.

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I'm very pleased to offer the excellent podcast produced from the recent webinar by Dr. Suresh Ramalingam, a leader in the lung cancer field who heads the Thoracic Oncology Program at Emory University in Atlanta. He's also a good friend I've known since our fellowship training days, and he was kind and generous enough to refuse the honorarium we offered for his participation, instead requesting that it be donated back and used for other GRACE programs. Instead, he was happy to do this entirely out of a commitment to the lung cancer community.

A topic that came up in a recent expert round table case discussion was the issue of how to manage a patient with a lung cancer for which the pathology report says "NSCLC not otherwise specified (NOS)", or "poorly differentiated NSCLC, NOS". What does this actually mean, and what does it mean in terms of treatment options?

This is part 2 of my round table case discussion with Dr. Anne Tsao, a medical oncologist and thoracic oncology expert from MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and Dr. Alex Farivar, a thoracic surgeon with expert training in mesothelioma at Swedish Cancer Institute in Seattle. This particular case covers a patient with a mesothelioma, cancer of the lining around the lung, which is also known as malignant pleural mesothelioma.

Here is the audio and video versions of the podcast, along with the transcript and figures.

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Brain metastases from NSCLC is almost a field of its own. This is because of the relatively high frequency with which metastases appear, the fact that they may return, even after treatment with whole brain radiation therapy (WBRT), and that our chemotherapy has long been considered to be ineffective against them. In fact, the extent of them as a problem is reflected in the number of thread questions on this subject in the GRACE forum.

For many years, chemotherapy for advanced or metastatic NSCLC had been limited to the use of “doublet” (two-drug) therapy using different combination regimens that were overall found to have very similar outcomes, but with different toxicity (side effect) profiles. Attempts to add a third chemotherapy agent for a triplet regimen, and numerous attempts to add different targeted-therapy agents, had dismal success. Not only did most of the combinations fail to improve on the survival outcomes, they increased the number of side effects compared with doublet chemotherapy alone.

Over the past several months the topic of so-called maintenance therapy in advanced NSCLC has been one of the most timely and controversy questions in lung cancer. We've had posts here covering a trial testing immediate vs.

At ASCO a little over a month ago we learned the preliminary results of the SATURN trial that compared "maintenance" Tarceva (erlotinib), the oral EGFR inhibitor, to an oral placebo in patients who showed no progression after four cycles of first line chemotherapy.

Maintenance therapy for advanced non-small cell lung cancer was certainly the big theme this year in the lung cancer presentations. Let's start with the Alimta data. Dr. West has outlined earlier results of this study after this data was presented at the 2008 ASCO meeting.

The ASCO meeting I'm at right now is so busy that there really isn't time to write a new post (though I'm still "tweeting from the meeting"). Though the talk show hows just air re-runs of old shows when they're on vacation, I'm trying to continue to add new content to the website during this time (and it's about as far from a vacation as anyone has in Orlando).