Targeted lung cancer treatment

Marianne Nicolson

01.12.2010

Chemotherapy has really been our mainstay and we have been quite pleased with the fact that we have seen the one-year survival rate in non-small cell lung cancer that is advanced rise from 10% to approximately 40% in patients over the past ten years. However, chemotherapy is a blunder-bust approach.

Increasingly now, as we get more knowledgeable about the differences, and the molecular biology, and indeed the genetics of lung cancer, we can also select those patients for whom targeted treatment might be the right option. And the targeted treatments often are delivered by mouth, which is much easier for the patient than intravenous chemotherapy, and frequently these novel treatments have fewer side-effects. So, it means that if we can select people well and deliver them less toxic treatment that has better efficacy as well, better outcomes for them, we are beginning to break into better treatments for lung cancer.