Abstract

Lung cancer genotyping is now largely offered to advanced lung cancer patients worldwide.

Various types of genotyping programmes have been developed either by academic institutions, academic consortiums, private companies or national cancer institutes. Globally, between the half and two-thirds of the tested tumours harbour a genetic alteration that could potentially be targeted by commercially available drugs or compounds assessed in clinical trials.

Beside the molecular profile issued from these large genotyping projects, the impact of these large genotyping initiatives on patients' outcomes, and especially patients' survival, is essential. Results available to date, both in the Lung Cancer Mutation Consortium study and the Biomarkers France study, are clearly encouraging.

However, many questions remained to be solved (targets? optimal technique(s)? turn around time? sampling? assessment of resistances? etc) and are currently assessed through activated or planned clinical trials worldwide, either in the adjuvant or the metastatic setting. A review of already activated and planned clinical trials will give a good view of the challenges to be faced in this new era of the management of lung cancer patients.