Dr. Jack West, Swedish Cancer Institute, defines maintenance therapy in advanced NSCLC and discusses maintenance treatment strategies.

Dr. Jack West, Swedish Cancer Institute, identifies the best choice for first-line chemotherapy for large-cell neuroendocrine histology.

Dr. Jack West, Swedish Cancer Institute, reviews the choices for a first-line chemotherapy regimen based on a squamous histology.

Dr. Jack West, Swedish Cancer Institute, addresses the issue of choosing a first-line chemotherapy regimen based on an adenocarcinoma histology.

Dr. Jack West, Swedish Cancer Institute, discusses the anti-angiogenic agent bevacizumab (Avastin) and the trial evidence of its efficacy for non-squamous NSCLC.

Dr. Jack West, Swedish Cancer Institute, identifies the platinum-based chemotherapy doublet as the backbone of first-line treatment for the majority of NSCLC patients.

Dr. Benjamin Levy, Mount Sinai Health Systems, discusses platinum-based chemotherapy as the standard of care for advanced NSCLC patients without targetable genetic mutations.

Although the ASCO Plenary session presentation on ALK inhibition with crizotinib was a darling of the entire conference and led to a post I wrote about on the way back from the meeting, there was actually a second presentation on lung cancer in t

The initial or "first line" management of advanced NSCLC has evolved quite a bit over the past 10 years, in that time moving from a much more uniform approach of very similar treatment for just about everyone to a revised approach that is far more individualized. First, we assess key issues like the subtype of NSCLC, focusing largely on whether it is squamous cell or non-squamous NSCLC, because treatment tends to diverge very early based on this factor.

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.