Whats the future of lung cancer treatment?
It’s very exciting to see that all the work that these scientists have done over the past three decades, to find out what a cancer cell is and what makes it tick, is finally starting to pay off in terms of developing new drugs. I think where everybody is hoping to go in the future—and I think the future’s right around the corner—is that they will be able to take someone’s tumor and study it under the microscope and figure out which of these targeted therapies may be most important. For example, someone’s tumor contains a lot of blood vessels, their treatment might involve an antiangiogenic drug, such as Avastin. If they find out that it needs a lot of growth factors to live, they may give a drug that inhibits growth factors, such as Iressa. One interesting thing that we are learning is that lung cancer seems to behave differently in men than in women. Some nonsmokers can come down with lung cancer and those tend to be women. And some of these new drugs, like Iressa, tend to work better
