Since the earliest clinical trials of EGFR inhibitors in NSCLC, certain clinically defined patient subsets became identified as more likely to show a benefit than others. Such studies suggested that women, patients with adenocarcinomas rather than squamous cell carcinomas, Asian patients, and never-smokers compared with current or former smokers were the patients who would do well with EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors like gefitinib (Iressa) or erlotinib (Tarceva).

As we established several years ago that it is indeed possible to do clinical trials with more than 50 or even 100 patients with advanced BAC, we were also seeing that those first forays into advanced BAC with standard chemotherapy were somewhat disappoingting (described further in another post).