The following is the edited transcript and figures from a webinar presentation made by Dr. Heather Wakelee, medical oncologist and Associate Professor at Stanford Cancer Center, on Never-Smokers and Gender Differences in Lung Cancer.

I'll start with the association of lung cancer with smoking.

It seems obvious: environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)/passive smoke exposure from being around smokers, can be harmful and may cause cancer in never-smokers. A new paper in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Lee and colleagues from Korea actually offers some evidence that highlights this, showing that never-smokers in Korea were less likely to have an EGFR mutation if they were exposed to ETS.

I would consider the recently published IPASS trial that compared Iressa (gefitinib) to standard chemo of carbo/taxol (paclitaxel) to be an extremely influential trial in lung cancer that has essentially ushered in a new era of molecularly-defined guidance of our treatment for many patients with advanced NSCLC, and we can expect that this is how we’ll be approaching a much broader population of lung cancer patients.

In the last post that presented the highlights of the FLEX trial that tested the benefit of adding Ebritux (cetuximab) to standard chemo.