CLINICAL RESULTS WITH CISPLATIN IN LUNG CANCER

Publisher Summary One of the reasons for high mortality due to lung cancer is that an early detection of lung cancer is difficult and the majority of patients present with unresectable disease. Therefore, chemotherapy is the modality often called upon to salvage the lung cancer patient. There has been a well-recognized dichotomy of the effectiveness of chemotherapy in the two major types of lung cancer: small cell and nonsmall cell. Small cell lung cancer is regarded by most investigators as a tumor that is responsive to chemotherapy, with several groups reporting significant increases in survival with chemotherapy. Nonsmall cell lung cancer has always been a tumor that is very refractory to chemotherapy. Cisplatin has not shown activity against lung cancer in the human tumor stem-cell assay system. This system is thought to be predictive for the lack of clinical activity of an antitumor agent in a particular patient's tumor. At this time, there is a paucity of phase II information on the single-agent activity of cisplatin against the various histologic subtypes of lung cancer.