A few weeks ago, Dr. Lecia Sequist, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), joined us for a live webinar we did in partnership with LUNGevity Foundation. Dr.

In a terrific podcast done a year ago about molecular markers in lung cancer and moving beyond a "one size fits all approach", Dr.

Two weeks from now (March 9, 3 PM EST/noon PST), Dr. Lecia Sequist of Massachusetts General Hospital will lead a free online webinar that is a joint program between GRACE and LUNGevity, on the topic of "Acquired Resistance to Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors (TKIs): What We Know Now, and How We’re Moving Forward", to be followed by an interactive Q&A session.

The IPASS trial that randomized never-smoking Asian patients with a previously untreated advanced lung adenocarcinoma to either standard chemo with carboplatin/Taxol (paclitaxel) or the oral EGFR inhibitor Iressa (gefitinib) was a pivotal study that changed how many of us thought about NSCLC.

I've written in the past about a class of proteins known as heat shock protein inhibitors as a targeted anticancer therapy, and there are a few that have been in clinical trials, including IPI-504 from Infinity Pharmaceuticals and STA-9090 from Synta Pharmaceuticals, with others also in development. The only trial that has actually been the subject of a completed clinical trial in NSCLC is IPI-504. Dr.

Just prior to ASCO, I mentioned the early results of the Cancer and Leurkemia Group B (CALGB -- Group A long-since defunct) 30406 trial.

The Importance of Identifying Molecular Markers in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer To understand the importance of molecular markers in the current and future treatment of lung cancer, one should first understand how lung cancer was classified up until the beginning of this decade. Pathologists would look at a sample of a patient's lung tumor under a microscope, and then make a judgment of whether the cells represented small cell lung cancer (SCLC) or non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

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.

Although the responses we see with a targeted therapy like the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) oral tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) for patients with the precise target, an activating mutation in the EGFR gene, has redefined our hopes and expectations about what is possible to achieve for at least some patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), nearly all of these patients develop a resistance to these agents at some point months or years after often having a very significant response to one of these agents.

Only a few years ago, oncologists saw lung cancer as divisible into small cell lung cancer (SCLC) and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), with very little relevance to any division beyond that point.