Loading
Everything in development, the medicines held by this cancer's subtypes, the open problems and what is being done about them, the roadmaps, and what changed on this record.
What is in development for Lung cancer (all types), drawn from the whole corpus: 68 items. Drugs are grouped by the most advanced trial phase they have reached anywhere; approved treatments sit under standard of care. Technologies are the methods being tested for this cancer, trials are the studies recorded here, and ideas are proposals not yet in a trial.
175 medicines on record are linked to one of the types below rather than to Lung cancer (all types) itself. Grouped by the type that holds them; each list opens that type's own page.
Most of the world's lung cancer is in countries with no screening. Asia carries 65.6 percent of cases and 64.3 percent of deaths (GLOBOCAN 2024), and of the ten European countries surveyed in 2026 only three had a formal programme. A screening benefit demonstrated in the Netherlands and the United States has to be re-earned in each health system that tries to deliver it.
Background: Screening. Also on OnCo: Symptoms and red flags · Early detection roadmap.
The risk models that select people for screening cannot see never-smokers. Fifteen percent of UK lung cancers, and 15 to 25 percent worldwide, arise in people who have never smoked, and every eligibility rule in use starts from smoking history. Nothing currently offered would find those cancers early.
Background: Screening. Also on OnCo: Symptoms and red flags · Early detection roadmap.
Overdiagnosis has never been measured well enough to quote. Estimates across the trials range from 0 to 67 percent (US Preventive Services Task Force evidence report, 2021), which is the widest range for any screened cancer, and the number decides how much of the screening benefit is real.
Background: Screening. Also on OnCo: Symptoms and red flags · Early detection roadmap.
Deprivation drives both the disease and the outcome. UK lung cancer mortality is 102 percent higher in women and 93 percent higher in men in the most deprived fifth than in the least, around 13,400 UK deaths a year are linked with deprivation, and five-year survival in England is 20.1 percent in the most deprived group against 27.6 percent in the least. Screening programmes sited in deprived areas narrow the first gap and may widen the second if uptake does not follow.
Background: Screening. Also on OnCo: Symptoms and red flags · Early detection roadmap.
Screening eligibility is written in pack-years, which excludes high-risk groups systematically: 31 percent of white smokers qualified against 17 percent of Black smokers in one United States cohort (Aldrich 2019), so a rule built to find the highest risk misses hardest where the risk is highest.
Background: Screening. Also on OnCo: Symptoms and red flags · Early detection roadmap.
Resistance arrives within one to three years for every targeted drug and is a heterogeneous set of diagnoses, including transformation into small-cell lung cancer in about one in seven, yet most patients move to the next line without a re-biopsy or a plasma profile to say what the tumour became.
Background: Circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA), Drug resistance (primary and acquired), MET amplification (bypass resistance), Oligoprogression, On-target resistance mutations (gatekeeper, solvent-front, compound). Also on OnCo: Resistance: how tumours escape each drug class · Lines of therapy.
Four perioperative immunotherapy schedules (before surgery, after surgery, on both sides, and with chemotherapy) are all standard somewhere and none has been compared with another, so nobody knows which one to choose or whether the adjuvant half adds anything.
Brain metastases are the dominant failure pattern in driver-positive disease and the newest inhibitors appear to prevent them, but prevention is measured as a secondary endpoint on inconsistent imaging schedules, so the size of the effect is unknown.
Background: Circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA), Minimal / molecular residual disease (MRD), Oligometastatic disease, Oligoprogression. Also on OnCo: Atlas of advanced disease · How cancer spreads: the metastasis stages.
Extensive-stage small-cell lung cancer gained two to three months of median survival from immunotherapy and still has no predictive biomarker; the four transcription-factor subtypes that might supply one have never been used prospectively to assign treatment.
Also on OnCo: Financial help · Coverage by country · Funding verdicts by country.
At the same stage and in systems free at the point of use, patients in more deprived circumstances are less likely to receive any lung cancer treatment (odds ratio 0.79), less likely to have surgery and less likely to have chemotherapy.
Dated changes read from the records linked to this cancer: approvals, regulatory steps, reported trials, guideline versions and milestones. Newest first; no date is inferred.
On EdgeAll 197 changes by month →When this page itself was last checked or edited.
Untreated advanced EGFR mutation-positive non-small-cell lung cancer (exon 19 deletion or L858R), with lazertinib
Untreated advanced non-small-cell lung cancer with an activating EGFR exon 20 insertion, with carboplatin and pemetrexed
Untreated locally advanced non-small-cell lung cancer unsuitable for definitive chemoradiation, or metastatic disease, with PD-L1 in 1 percent or more of tumour cells and no EGFR or ALK alteration, with platinum-based chemotherapy
Untreated advanced EGFR mutation-positive non-small-cell lung cancer (exon 19 deletion or L858R), with amivantamab
Resectable non-small-cell lung cancer at high risk of recurrence without an EGFR mutation or ALK rearrangement: neoadjuvant with platinum chemotherapy then adjuvant alone