Diagnostic and Predictive Biomarkers in Lung Cancer
A special issue of Cancers (ISSN 2072-6694). This special issue belongs to the section "Cancer Biomarkers".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2020) | Viewed by 63845
Special Issue Editors
Interests: molecular pathology; thoracic oncology; laboratory management
Interests: molecular pathology; biomarkers
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Despite advances in treatment, lung cancer remains the most frequent cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, with a 5-year relative survival rate of 24% for all stages. A critical issue related to improvement in patient outcomes will be the ability to define tumor genetic profiles, allowing personalized therapeutic decisions to be made.
Indeed, in the era of targeted and immuno-therapies, new drugs are becoming available and those on the market are starting to be used in combination or sequentially to overcome resistance mechanisms. The great challenge for the pathologist is to guide treatment accurately, which involves going beyond diagnosis and tumor classification and giving clinically useful diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive parameters in a time frame consistent with clinical needs.
In this view, the development of a comprehensive genomic profile moving beyond the standard-of-care EGFR/ALK/ROS1 and PD-L1 evaluations has been under investigation. Moreover, new predictive biomarkers for immunotherapy responses, such as Tumor Mutational Burden (TMB) and Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TILs), or the evaluation of symbiotic microorganisms living in the gut (microbiota) have recently been explored.
Unfortunately, up to 70% of patients with NSCLC are diagnosed at advanced stages and tissue biopsies often cannot be taken; therefore, tumor molecular profiling should be performed using different sources as cytological samples obtained with the EBUS-TBNA (endobronchial ultrasound-guided trans-bronchial needle aspiration) technique. In this regard, rapid on-site evaluation (ROSE) by cytopathologists has improved the adequacy and management of cytology samples for morphological, phenotypical, and molecular testing.
Moreover, liquid biopsy, which is based on the detection of tumor-related biomarkers from body fluids such as the peripheral blood, is a relatively new, very promising tool that could capture spatial and temporal intra-tumoral heterogeneity.
Lastly, the evolving molecular landscape of neuroendocrine tumors of the lung, mainly Small Cell Lung Cancers (SCLC) and Large Cell Neuroendocrine Carcinomas (LCNEC) deserves a special mention for its therapeutic implications. Different chemotherapy schemes according to molecular biomarkers could offer new opportunities to patients with LCNEC.
This Special Issue of Cancers will highlight the current state-of-the-art technology in diagnostic and predictive assays used for lung cancer with special emphasis on future prospects in early diagnosis, biomarker integration, and tumor response evaluation.
Dr. Massimo Barberis
Dr. Caterina Fumagalli
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- NSCLC
- Neuroendocrine carcinoma
- Biomarkers
- Comprehensive molecular profile
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