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.

Probably the leading story in lung cancer at ASCO this year was about ALK inhibitor therapy and the Pfizer drug crizotinib (PF-02341066). Though

I thought I'd just take a moment to talk about what I'm finding with regard to ALK rearrangements in patients with NSCLC (see here for review). I hope and expect that there will be more to learn at the ASCO conference in early June, either in the setting of official presentations on the subject or through informal discussions with my colleagues who are also involved with this work.

I'm very pleased to offer the excellent podcast produced from the recent webinar by Dr. Suresh Ramalingam, a leader in the lung cancer field who heads the Thoracic Oncology Program at Emory University in Atlanta. He's also a good friend I've known since our fellowship training days, and he was kind and generous enough to refuse the honorarium we offered for his participation, instead requesting that it be donated back and used for other GRACE programs. Instead, he was happy to do this entirely out of a commitment to the lung cancer community.

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.

Dr. Pinder previously summarized the early story of the newly identified EML4-ALK mutation in NSCLC, which traces back only a couple of years. Amazingly, in that short time, treatments targeting this mutation have already been identified and administered to patients who are benefiting from these novel agents at this very moment.