EGF receptor in lung cancer: a successful story of targeted therapy

Lung cancer research has incorporated molecular medicine into the management of this disease during the last 5 years. Several novel tumorigenesis pathways associated with lung cancer development and proliferation have been discovered and further developed as targets. The idea behind this is to deliver individualized therapy for each patient based on his/her tumor phenotype, which may involve the overexpression or lack of certain proteins, receptors, mutations and other factors. To date, many of these characteristics have been shown to have a potential role as prognostic or predictive biomarkers, with most of the available data being obtained from retrospective analyses, various laboratory platforms, and data sets used for comparison. However, well-designed prospective randomized clinical trials are underway to validate the significance and future role of these novel biomarkers, allowing us to sort out the best personalized management for an individual with lung cancer diagnosis. Nevertheless, one of these features, the EGF receptor (EGFR) gene mutation, has emerged as a prognostic and strongly predictive biomarker when EGFR inhibition is used as a therapy for tumors that harbor the mutation. Our article displays the most recently developed data related to this biomarker and what have we learned based on the analyses of clinical trials that have studied different agents in the clinical arena.