CBCE - The Center for Biomedical Continuing Education

Despite several decades of extensive research, the median survival for patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is approximately 1 year. Patients with early-stage NSCLC can sometimes be cured with surgical resection and chemotherapy, but the majority of patients present with advanced disease, which makes local therapy impossible. In this challenging and continually evolving treatment setting, careful selection of an appropriate treatment plan by considering available clinical trial data and patient characteristics can significantly impact survival. Advances in technology have resulted in the development of new staging and surgical techniques that may improve the accuracy of tumor staging and the safety of surgical resection. The identification of genes that may be useful for clinical decision making has led to investigations into the use of molecular markers as tools that may help overcome the current plateau in chemotherapy efficacy. Extensive research has led to steady advancements in recent years that include the development of novel targeted and chemotherapeutic agents, enhanced approaches to combined-modality therapies, and improvements in the efficacy of adjuvant therapy.

This conference will focus on the latest advances in imaging, radiotherapy, surgery, chemotherapy, and biological agents for the diagnosis and treatment of patients with NSCLC. At the end of this activity, participants will be able to evaluate results from clinical trials investigating recent technical advances in tumor staging and surgical resection; assess the role of genomic profiling, molecular markers, and tumor histology in predicting risk and response to therapy; and discuss treatment strategies for patients with stage III or oligometastatic disease.