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Delineating patient and tumor characteristics that influence treatment response is beginning to show promise in helping clinicians to provide customized therapies for lung cancer. Patients with adenocarcinomas, women, Asians, and nonsmokers tend to have tumors that express epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene mutations and that respond well to the EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) gefitinib and erlotinib. To better understand the association between EGFR mutations and treatment responses, researchers for two separate studies in Asia and in Europe analyzed outcomes in patients who had advanced non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and who received EGFR TKIs or chemotherapy.
In the Asian study, investigators randomized 1217 former li…