Emerging therapies in non-small-cell lung cancer

Lung cancer remains the single most devastating cause of cancer-related dea th with approximately 1.5 million cases of lung cancer expected worldwide a nd more than 1.3 million cancer-related deaths in 2001. In the United State s alone, of 164,100 news cases expected in the year 2000, about 70,000 will be metastatic disease (stage IV), and another 70,000 will be locally advan ced (stages IIIA and IIIB) [1]. Therefore, the five-year survival rate for lung cancer has improved only incrementally from 5% in the late 1950s to 14 % by 1994 [2, 3]. While advances in combined modality therapy have led to s ignificant progress against locally advanced disease, it was only a decade ago that few believed that the treatment of stage IV non-small-cell lung ca ncer was justifiable. However, multiple randomized trials in the 1980s and 1990s have changed the role of chemotherapy in lung cancer, such that by th e middle of the next decade, it may be that only patients with stage IA non -small-cell lung cancer are not considered as candidates for chemotherapy.