Personalized medicine in lung adenocarcinoma: no longer a hope or a passing fashion, but a new reality

Excerpt

In past decades, lung adenocarcinoma has simply been treated like every other non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). More recently, a new concept has emerged for the treatment of this kind of NSCLC: histo-guidance. A study by Scagliotti et al. [1] demonstrated different results of a new cisplatin-based chemotherapy—cisplatin-pemetrexed—depending on histology, and therapeutic strategy has since been considered distinct in adenocarcinoma and squamous-cell carcinoma. Even more recently, tyrosine-kinase inhibitors (TKI) favorably challenged the efficacy of chemotherapy in patients with mutated epithelial growth factor receptors (EGFR) [2‐4]. These studies provide a proof of concept of personalized medicine in lung adenocarcinoma. The era when a simple pathologic examination was sufficient to decide on an accurate medical treatment is coming to an end, as we see in breast carcinoma. Today, we must consider lung adenocarcinoma not as a whole, but as a group of distinct diseases that should be treated on the basis of their different molecular profiles. …