Dr. Geoffrey Oxnard of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute talks about exciting new developments which will allow oncologists to test patients' lung tumors without invasive biopsies. February 2014.

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Dr. Heather Wakelee of Stanford University Medical Center discusses whether or not cabozantinib - a drug already approved for thyroid cancer - can help patients with lung cancer. February 2014.

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Dr. David Spigel, Sarah Cannon Cancer Center, discusses the importance of genomic testing in squamous lung cancer.

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Here's the second half of the presentation by Dr. Gerard Silvestri, expert pulmonologist and critical care specialist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, on pulmonary complications from lung cancer treatment.

We've covered a wide range of topics  in our "ASCO 2012 Lung Cancer Highlights" podcast series over the last few weeks.  This webinar and the podcasts from it featured Drs.

Apologies for the long wait since our own Dr. Weiss's upbeat and thoughtful review of the leading stories about lung cancer in 2011.  Dr. Weiss covered a lot of ground in his presentation that was followed by a Q&A session, so we've broken that up into several short pieces that cover a few highlights at a time.

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.

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

Thyroid transcription factor-1 (TTF-1) is a protein seen on the surface of thyroid cells, but also on about 70-75% lung adenocarcinomas and only a small minority (~10%) of squamous cell NSCLC tumors. In fact, the presence of TTF-1 on a NSCLC tumor provides a good hint for the pathologist that this is an adenocarcinoma. It's an immunohistochemical (IHC) test that is done on the vast majority of lung cancers, and there's some new information that suggests it may also be useful for predicting which patients are especially unlikely to have an EGFR mutation or ALK rearrangement.

The FLEX trial, a European study of cisplatin/Navelbine (vinorelbine) with or without the monoclonal antibody against EGFR Erbitux (cetuximab), was a technically positive study that was initially reported at ASCO 2008. However, showing an improvement in median survival of just 1.2 months, most oncologists came away feeling that the trial illustrated the difference between a statistically vs.