2008 Meeting of the National Lung Cancer Partnership: a summary of meeting highlights.

Herein are highlights from National Lung Cancer Partnership's Annual Meeting, held May 30, 2008 in Chicago. Aiming to improve the match between lung cancer patients and their drug treatments, speakers described potential predictive and prognostic biomarkers. Approaches included: (1) in non-small cell lung cancer, testing for predictive links between tumor expression levels of DNA synthesis (RRM1) and repair (ERCC1) enzymes and response to gemcitabine and cisplatin respectively, and looking for a prognostic link with ERCC1 expression; (2) validating a predictive "meta-gene profile" from gene expression microarray studies to distinguish drug-responsive from unresponsive lung cancer tumors; and (3) developing proteomics profiling to distinguish lung cancer patients, including squamous and nonsquamous cell carcinoma patients, who respond to epidermal growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors from those who do not. The notion that cancer stem cells are fundamental in the development and progression of solid tumors including lung cancers was also discussed. Potential strategies for using this information to identify useful targets for next-generation therapies were suggested.

2007 Annual Meeting of the National Lung Cancer Partnership: a summary of meeting highlights.

This report presents highlights from The National Lung Cancer Partnership's Annual Meeting, held in June 2007 in Chicago. It discusses recent refinements in the histologic, genetic, and epigenetic subtyping of lung cancers and suggests reasons why certain therapies benefit only a subset of lung cancer patients. It also describes new molecular data about the subtype-specific differences in drug resistance among bronchioloalveolar-associated non-small cell lung cancers and discusses strategies to avoid or tackle specific drug-resistant tumors. Finally, it describes new findings about epigenetic differences-specifically in DNA hypermethylation-among lung tumors, including some male/female differences, which may prove useful as biomarkers for diagnosis, prognosis, and prediction of response to treatments.