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.