Occasionally at meetings, oncologists are confronted with a marketing study done by the pharmaceutical industry that reveals that something like half of patients diagnosed with lung cancer never receive any treatment.

We've covered the modest activity of a few mTOR inhibitors in NSCLC (see prior post), so now we'll turn to SCLC.

In a recent post I described a class of novel targeted treatments being studied in lung cancer as well as other treatment settings. These drugs inhibit mTOR, or the mammalian target of rapamycin, an immunosuppressant used to prevent rejection of organ transplants, but other drugs that inhibit this intracellular protein also have some anticancer effects.

When I first described the developing work with the EGFR monoclonal antibody erbitux (cetuximab) two years ago (see prior post), I described a trial that was just getting started called SWOG 0536.

As a general rule, companies don't sit on great news with their drugs. Without any insider knowledge, this was my concern about why we hadn't heard anything about the results of three major lung cancer trials with the agent Zactima (vandetanib), which I had written a post about 8 months ago (see prior post about these trials with Zactima, an oral agent that inhibits both VEGF, a major mediator of angiogenesis, and the EGFR pathway).

Actually, it's some background information and your blood that's needed.

Over the past several weeks, coincident with the opening of a new large clinical trial and some publicity associated with that, several people have asked me here about a lung cancer vaccine called Lucanix (full name belagenpumatucel-L, so a near guarantee that nobody will call this anything but Lucanix). My initial response was that I knew essentially nothing about it and more or less implied that there must not be much to it if there was really no buzz about it within the lung cancer community.

One of the core ideas in the management of stage III, or locally advanced, NSCLC is that unresectable disease that is being treated with curative intent is most effectively treated with a combination of concurrent systemic ("whole body") therapy and chest radiation to all of the visible cancer.

One of the novel agents being studied in lung cancer is sutent (sunitinib), a multi-targeted oral anti-angiogenic drug that I’ve described in a prior post.

I'll get back to the storyline of our growing understanding of the differences of individuals based on pharmacogenomics very soon. But I wanted to give people some breaking news that just came out.