My friend and colleague, Dr. Ramiswamy Govindan, is one of the national leaders in lung cancer, and he was kind enough to participate in our NSCLC Patient Education Forum. There, he spoke in some general terms about what patients might expect from chemo/radiation for locally advanced lung cancer (which could include limited SCLC as well as stage III NSCLC), but he also used the occasion to talk about general guidelines about where we've come from and where we're going with cancer treatments.

Infused throughout the website is a constant recognition that "patients are different", but while we know this intuitively, we're really not moved to a point of individualizing treatment on the basis of this. There are many lines of clinical research that are moving in that direction, and one of the key elements is pharmacogenomics, the study of the genetic underpinnings of the differences among people in response to a medication, both in terms of response and side effects.