Tarceva and Iressa (some of you may remember this drugs from a few years ago) have certainly become popular drugs for treating lung cancer, specially in the adenocarcinoma type of lung cancer. Drs. Pennell and West have discussed tarceva in other posts on this website – how it works, who benefits the most, what is the impact of certain mutations on the effect of the drug. Unfortunately, we are also too well familiar with the fact that these drugs don’t work forever and the cancer relapses even after having initially responded well.

Back when I first started doing this, one of my earliest posts (see here) was on the question of whether EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) (see introduction to this work in prior post).

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).