Lung cancer: Combined modality therapy in NSCLC

Combined modality treatment has 'come out of age' and increasingly represents standard of care for a rapidly growing number of patients in locally advanced stages of NSCLC. Modern progress of treatment techniques as well as possibilities for supportive interventions will lead to lesser treatment toxicities, better patient's compliance to treatment protocols and combinations of different modalities with a more efficient outcome. This number will further increase, as more and more centres in Europe are setting up the logistics of multidisciplinary treatment groups for patients with lung cancer. Standard of care for most disease stages is currently under investigation in large randomised phase-III trials. Further research in the forthcoming years has to address questions of treatment individualisation (risks, prognosis, need for local control in the individual patient, biological evaluation of tumour aggressiveness, DNA-fingerprinting of tumours, evaluation of MRD-status, treatment in the community). New drugs or treatment principles with different mechanisms of action such as antiangiogenesis factors, signal-transduction inhibitors, immunotherapy, antisense-oligonucleotides or gene(replacement) therapy may stimulate further clinical research. This may eventually define 'new modalities of treatment' thus leading to modern 'second-generation combined-modality protocols' including some of the new principles.