Last night I had the good fortune to attend the fun young lung dinner. I had a lot of fun seeing old friends, and greatly enjoyed making a few new ones:

Here's a continuation of the webinar content by Dr. Lecia Sequist, who is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

Since we've come to appreciate the presence of distinct activating EGFR mutations associated with a very high probability of responding to an oral EGFR inhibitor, the question has emerged about whether there are significant differences in outcomes between the two most common ones, which are a deletion in exon 19 and a "

Please Note: New Treatments Have Emerged Since this Original Post

In the last several years we have seen an explosion in the knowledge and understanding of the molecular basis of cancer behavior. The identification of EGFR mutations, and their utilization in predicting response and survival in patients with untreated advanced lung cancer, provides lung cancer oncologists with the optimism that we may truly be able to offer effective “personalized therapy” for patients with lung cancer in the near future.

Hi again! You can think of this as a companion piece to my last post, examining some recent (but admittedly preliminary) evidence suggesting that Iressa (gefitinib) and Tarceva (erlotinib) may not be equivalent for patients with differing types of EGFR mutations. This is a slightly different topic, but one that has been quite contentious for several years: do KRAS mutations, found in 20% or more of patients with NSCLC, identify a group of patients who are resistant to EGFR inhibitors?

Hi all! I had to take a month off in July as I was forgetting what my family looked like, but am now refreshed and ready to talk (write, really) about more interesting topics in the field of lung cancer. I just returned from the World Conference on Lung Cancer in San Francisco, where Drs. West, Sanborn, and I enjoyed some great foo… I mean, learned a great deal about what is happening in the world of lung cancer.

Erlotinib (Tarceva) was approved for treatment of progressive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) after the BR21 study that showed that tarceva not only improved survival but also improved lung cancer symptoms and quality of life. This study and others have also taught us that the benefit of tarceva is much better in those who had never smoked and less effective in current smokers.