It's not uncommon for a question here to be about the a pathologist's terminology on a report that equivocates about whether a lesion is bronchioloalveolar carcinoma (BAC) or another form of adenocarcinoma, perhaps "well-differentiated adenocarcinoma", especially if it has a radiographic appearance of a hazy infiltrate or many small ground glass opacities.

Continuing Dr. West's theme discussing new therapies for patients with acquired resistance, I'd like to answer a few questions about HSP 90 inhibitors that have caught my attention on GRACE over the past few weeks, and in particular, highlight my "pet" targeted agent, AUY922. HSP 90 inhibitors are drugs that many of you already know about-they are being studied in patients with ALK(+)lung cancer and as a 2^nd line therapy option for all patients with lung cancer with Taxotere.

It was almost exactly a year ago that I described the basic results of the global LUX Lung-1 trial that enrolled 585 patients with advanced NSCLC who had gone at least 12 weeks without progression on Tarceva (erlotinib) or Iressa (gefitinib) in a 2:1 fashion to either the oral targeted therapy afatinib (an irreversible inhibitor of the human epidermal receptor (HER) family, of which EGFR

The question of "who should be tested?" for an epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation and potentially other molecular markers is among the most timely questions in lung cancer management today. The field has changed dramatically since the initial description of the mutation, associated with a high probability of an impressive and often prolonged response to EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) therapy, back in 2004.

I apologize if it seems that the updates about ASCO have been slow in coming. This is mostly because the lung cancer program this year has most of the higher profile presentations occurring in the second half of the meeting, which we're just getting into. And, truth be told, this isn't going to be a blockbuster year for developments in lung cancer. But let's review what we've found out about thus far.

The third and last podcast from our discussions with Dr. Lecia Sequist, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, covers the question & answer session that followed her excellent

The short answer is no. Since the introduction of the targeted agents that inhibit the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), both the oral EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) like Iressa (gefitinib) or Tarceva (Erbitux), and the monoclonal antibody therapies against EGFR like Erbitux (cetuximab) have been identified as often having a rash as a leading side effect.

Over the past several years, probably the biggest development in the field of NSCLC has been the recognition of the importance of molecularly-defined subgroups that help define the clinical patterns of how patients are likely to do with various treatments. We've seen this clearly illustrated with EGFR mutations vs.

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.

One of the trials presented at the Chicago Multidisciplinary Symposium in Thoracic Oncology last month was the TITAN trial, one of a pair of studies conducted in Europe to test the oral EGFR inhibitor Tarceva (erlotinib) in patients with chemotherapy pre-treated advanced NSCLC. The other trial, SATURN, was designed to test Tarceva as a maintenance therapy vs.