Subtypes of Lung Cancer Tumors Identified

A U.S. study has identified three subtypes of non-small-cell lung cancer tumors — a finding that may provide information about patient survival.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers say their discovery might have significant implications for people in the early or late stages of the disease, suggesting how likely the cancer is to spread and whether the tumor will prove resistant to chemotherapy.

Currently, lung cancer treatment decisions are based largely on the location and size of the tumor and if it has spread, or metastasized. Lung tumor cells are diagnosed by their appearance under a microscope.

About 20 percent of such tumors are classified as small-cell carcinomas; the rest fall into a catch-all diagnosis of “non-small-cell carcinoma, for which therapies often lead to unpredictable results.

While this is still very preliminary, we hope to take these gene expression patterns and attempt to define a very simple, reproducible system that will allow us to unravel the complex patterns of how the tumors progress and how they respond to therapy, said study lead author Dr. David Neil Hayes, assistant professor of medicine.

The study appears in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.