Clinical Use of Serum Biomarkers in Non-small Cell Lung Cancer

With an estimated mortality of 1.18 million deaths per year worldwide, lung cancer is still one of the most deadly types of cancer and one of the current remaining challenges in medicine with a major impact on society. The tremendous impact of smoking is one of the well-known causes, which is widely recognized and attacked through the use of anti-smoking campaigns. During recent years, mortality rates amongst men have been reduced considerably, while it has reached a plateau phase in women. Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the more frequent variant (about 80 per cent of all lung cancers). Unfortunately, it is often only detected in the late stages of the disease (about 80 per cent of cases), when a tumor has already spread locally or systemically and cannot be cured by surgical means anymore. Currently the differentiation between small and non-small cell lung cancer is crucial to stratify the patients for systemic or potentially surgical approaches. Biomarkers are important for the early detection of recurrent disease.
They provide information concerning the biology of the tumor, the prediction of response to therapy, the prognosis and, when measured during the follow up of the treatment applied, the monitoring of the actual therapy efficacy. In this volume, the authors demonstrate the potential relevance of biomarkers in occupational medicine for screening purposes, highlighting the utility of biomarkers for the estimation of prognosis for the early and the advanced stages of NSCLC. It's a compulsory read for those professionals of the healthcare sector interested in or working on the area of biomarkers, nanotechnology, oncology and, specially, lung cancer.