Italian clinical research in non-small-cell lung cancer

ABSTRACT Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer deaths in both men and women worldwide and has a poor prognosis. Non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) represents approximately 80% of all lung cancers. Surgery is the only curative treatment of NSCLC but only 15–20% of tumours can be radically resected with a survival of about 40% at 5 years. Considering these disappointing results NSCLC is one of the most frequent subjects of clinical research worldwide. Italy is playing an important role in the clinical research of NSCLC performing phase I, II and III trials, prevalently by cooperative groups, and achieving important results that contributed to define the standard treatment for NSCLC p…