A new horizon of targeted therapy in management of lung cancer

1 Introduction Cisplatin-based combination chemotherapy using one of the novel cytotoxic agents, such as gemcitabine or taxane, prolongs survival of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The recent published phase Ⅲ study that compared paclitaxel/cisplatin to gemcitabine/cisplatin, docetaxel/cisplatin or paclitaxel/carboplatin has shown equal efficacy with the exception of longer progression-free survival from the gemcitabine/cisplatin combination[1]. Overall tumor response rates of 1 155 eligible patients was 19% with median survival of 7. 9months only. Findings from other major randomized comparative studies were similar. Table 1 summarized the tumor response rate and survival of these studies[1-4]. Hundreds of patients received platinumbased new drug doublets and the overall response rate was persistently reported at only about 20% to 30%. Survivals were better than the first generation of combination chemotherapy but the best median survival was less than 10 months and 1-year survival rate was persistently less than 45 %.