Here's the next installment of the panel discussion on molecular markers from the webinar in Santa Monica with Drs. Charlie Rudin, Alice Shaw, David Spigel, and Glen Goss.  We continued our animated discussion on the promise as well as the pitfalls of broadening the use of molecular markers in routine practice of managing patients with advanced NSCLC.

I'm happy to bring you now the second part of the Santa Monica webinar, developed with the LUNGevity Foundation, on "Molecular Markers in Advanced NSCLC: Who to Test and What to Test For?", in which I was joined by Drs.

This is the first of a series of podcasts from the two hour special webinar we did in partnership with the LUNGevity Foundation at the Santa Monica "Targeted Therapies in Lung Cancer" meeting several weeks ago.  There, I was privileged to be joined by four excellent guest faculty members -- Dr.

I'm very proud to have teamed up with Dr. Ross Camidge from the University of Colorado in writing an editorial piece for the current issue of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology called "Have Mutation, Will Travel: Utilizing Online Patient Communities and New Trial Strategies to Optimize Clinical Research in the Era of Molecularly Diverse Oncology".

I'm just now returning from the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer's "12th Annual Targeted Therapies in Lung Cancer Conference", which consisted of about 170 very brief talks about several classes of agents, as I described in my last post.  Some of these are likely to emerge as viable, truly beneficial therapies for patients; many others will fall by the wayside.

Though I didn't make it to the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting in mid-April, I did catch discussion that followed presentation of some preliminary data from the Biomarker-integrated Approaches of Targeted Therapy for Lung Cancer Elimination (BATTLE) trial, conducted at MD Anderson Cancer Center over the last several years. My friend and colleague, Dr. Ed Kim, presented the provocative early results. The study enrolled 255 patients with previously treated advanced NSCLC who had previously received a median of two prior lines of therapy.

Last week, Dr. Ross Camidge from the University of Colorado joined me on a webinar entitled "One Size Does Not Fit All" in which he discussed the early work on ALK rearrangements and the novel agent PF-02341066 (now known as crizotinib) in particular, and the new era of molecularly defined practice of oncology in particular. This story has been widely considered to be among the most important in the field of lung cancer over the last few years, and Dr. Camidge did not disappoint.