A quick point on the importance of biology over treatment. Years ago, I highlighted the results in the TRIBUTE trial of chemo with placebo or combined with erlotinib (tarceva) at the same time (biomarker study abstract here), which showed that patients with EGFR mutations had a much better survival whether they received an EGFR inhibitor or not:

In my last post I outlined the typical clinical scenario for pneumonic bronchioloalveolar carcinoma (BAC), which is typically the mucinous subtype of this unusual disease. In fact, we are still actively learning a great deal about BAC, enough for the lung cancer experts to begin to develop a more sophisticated view that the mucinous and non-mucinous subtypes have different behaviors and respond differently to treatments.

Let's return to what happened with Anne S., who I introduced in the last post. The highlights are that I met this woman in September of 2005, when she was 79, slowing down from many medical issues unrelated to cancer, wary about chemo, and with a cancer that was metastatic but that had progressed only minimally in the months between the initial detection of her cancer and when I first saw her. We agreed that attentive follow-up made sense.

Actually, it's some background information and your blood that's needed.

The European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress, similar to ASCO but based in Europe, has been going on in Stockholm, where the results of a study called the First Line Iressa versus Carboplatin/Paclitaxel in Asia Study (taking some liberties to force it into the acronym "IPASS") was presented in the Presidential Symposium by my friend and Hong Kong-based colleague Tony Mok.

We’re recognizing more and more that lung cancer in never-smokers (LCINS) is a distinct disease, with different patterns of who gets it, how the cancer behaves, and it responds to treatments. But this recognition is still a work in progress, coming from a background in which the party line has been that NSCLC is treated the same regardless of the histologic type (squamous, adenocarcinoma, large cell, or other), smoking history, or other factors.

In Japan, a different chemotherapy approach than cisplatin doublet chemo has been used in the post-operative setting. In contrast to the North American and European approach of 3-4 cycles of platinum-based chemo, in Japan they have studied an oral chemotherapy called UFT, a combination of uracil and tegafur. This combination is in the same family as an old chemo drug called 5-FU that is still used in various settings today, although not commonly in lung cancer.

One of the core ideas in the management of stage III, or locally advanced, NSCLC is that unresectable disease that is being treated with curative intent is most effectively treated with a combination of concurrent systemic ("whole body") therapy and chest radiation to all of the visible cancer.

One of my earliest posts when I started OncTalk was on the use of oral inhibitors of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), one of the growth signals that is often over-active in cancer cells, against advanced bronchioloalveolar carcinoma (BAC), a unique subtype of lung cancer that tends to grow within the lungs, sometimes slowly, and not progress elsewhere.

Please Note: New Treatments Have Emerged Since this Original Post