*February 2022*
A growing recognition of the distinct clinical, pathological, and biological features of lung cancers that arise in nonsmokers is fostering greater interest in examining the molecular underpinnings of lung cancer in this patient subset.
During the past 2 decades, the treatment of patients with lung cancer has undergone a paradigm shift, a transformation fueled by genome sequencing efforts that have revealed oncogenic driver mutations and fostered targeted drug development.
Tobacco smoking is the most significant risk factor for lung cancer development1; therefore, findings from studies of smoking-associated disease largely have informed our current understanding of the genomic background of this cancer type.2
Now a growing recognition of the distinct clinical, pathological, and biological features of lung cancers that arise in nonsmokers3 is fostering greater interest in examining the molecular underpinnings of lung cancer in this patient subset, which by itself ranks among the top 10 causes of cancer-related mortality.4
Findings from recent large-scale genome sequencing studies of tumors from never smokers have demonstrated that differences between tumors from smokers and nonsmokers extend to the molecular level.2,5 Data from these studies have important implications for the way that patients with lung cancers are treated and highlight the need for earlier identification of disease in never smokers. Read more.
