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Lung Cancer Awareness Day

Lung cancer is the second most common form of cancer in the world and accounts for 1.6 million cancer related deaths every year. Although there is no direct cause for lung cancer, tobacco smoke is one of the most common risk factors in addition to previous exposure to carcinogens and family history.  

Most lung cancers are diagnosed at an advanced stage due to the absence of clinical symptoms and effective screening methods. There are two different categories of lung cancer; small cell (SCLC) and non-small cell (NSCLC), with the latter being the most common type of cancer and represents around 85% of all new lung cancer cases. Significant progress has been made in lung cancer therapies such as the recent developments in tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) and immunotherapy that improve both patient survival and quality of life.

1st August 2021 marks World Lung Cancer Day to raise awareness of the challenges and threats that lung cancer poses around the world, and to celebrate the new research into diagnosis and treatment breakthroughs which could hopefully one day lead to a cure for this devastating disease.

The Editors of BMC Medicine are delighted to share with you a selection of key papers that highlight some of the most recent lung cancer research published in the journal to mark the Lung Cancer Awareness Day.

World Lung Cancer Day 2021 2


  1. Targeted therapy and immunotherapy put forward higher demands for accurate lung cancer classification, as well as benign versus malignant disease discrimination. Digital whole slide images (WSIs) witnessed the...

    Authors: Huan Yang, Lili Chen, Zhiqiang Cheng, Minglei Yang, Jianbo Wang, Chenghao Lin, Yuefeng Wang, Leilei Huang, Yangshan Chen, Sui Peng, Zunfu Ke and Weizhong Li
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2021 19:80
  2. Artificial intelligence (AI) in diagnostic radiology is undergoing rapid development. Its potential utility to improve diagnostic performance for cardiopulmonary events is widely recognized, but the accuracy a...

    Authors: Jordan Chamberlin, Madison R. Kocher, Jeffrey Waltz, Madalyn Snoddy, Natalie F. C. Stringer, Joseph Stephenson, Pooyan Sahbaee, Puneet Sharma, Saikiran Rapaka, U. Joseph Schoepf, Andres F. Abadia, Jonathan Sperl, Phillip Hoelzer, Megan Mercer, Nayana Somayaji, Gilberto Aquino…
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2021 19:55
  3. Tumor mutational burden (TMB) has both prognostic value in resected non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients and predictive value for immunotherapy response. However, TMB evaluation by whole-exome sequencin...

    Authors: Yanhua Tian, Jiachen Xu, Qian Chu, Jianchun Duan, Jianjun Zhang, Hua Bai, Zhenlin Yang, Wenfeng Fang, Liangliang Cai, Rui Wan, Kailun Fei, Jie He, Shugeng Gao, Li Zhang, Zhijie Wang and Jie Wang
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2020 18:232
  4. The therapeutic approach for the second-line treatment of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) without actionable mutations has been revolutionized by the recent approval of new effective ...

    Authors: Alessandro Morabito
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2018 16:24

    The original article was published in BMC Medicine 2017 15:193

  5. Docetaxel, pemetrexed, erlotinib, and gefitinib are recommended as second-line treatment for advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with wild-type or unknown status for epidermal growth factor receptor (E...

    Authors: Perrine Créquit, Anna Chaimani, Amélie Yavchitz, Nassima Attiche, Jacques Cadranel, Ludovic Trinquart and Philippe Ravaud
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2017 15:193

    The Commentary to this article has been published in BMC Medicine 2018 16:24

  6. In lung cancer screening, a nodule management protocol describes nodule assessment and thresholds for nodule size and growth rate to identify patients who require immediate diagnostic evaluation or additional ...

    Authors: Marina Treskova, Ines Aumann, Heiko Golpon, Jens Vogel-Claussen, Tobias Welte and Alexander Kuhlmann
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2017 15:162
  7. Advances in deep sequencing technology have led to developments in personalized medicine. Here, we describe the implications of a recent investigation that sequenced ctDNA from the plasma of non-small cell lun...

    Authors: Clare Fiala and Eleftherios P. Diamandis
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2017 15:157
  8. Immune checkpoint inhibitors have significantly modified the therapeutic landscape of advanced non-small cell lung cancer in second-line settings, with a more recent advancement in first-line settings. Given t...

    Authors: Jordi Remon, Benjamin Besse and Jean-Charles Soria
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2017 15:55

    The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Medicine 2017 15:82

  9. Multiple treatments are frequently available for a given condition, and clinicians and patients need a comprehensive, up-to-date synthesis of evidence for all competing treatments. We aimed to quantify the was...

    Authors: Perrine Créquit, Ludovic Trinquart, Amélie Yavchitz and Philippe Ravaud
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2016 14:8

    The Commentary to this article has been published in BMC Medicine 2016 14:59

  10. About 90 % of patients with intra-thoracic malignancy experience breathlessness. Breathing training is helpful, but it is unknown whether repeated sessions are needed. The present study aims to test whether th...

    Authors: Miriam J Johnson, Mona Kanaan, Gerry Richardson, Samantha Nabb, David Torgerson, Anne English, Rachael Barton and Sara Booth
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2015 13:213
  11. The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is a validated therapeutic target in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, current single agent receptor targeting does not achieve a maximal therapeutic effe...

    Authors: Gang Chen, Peter Kronenberger, Erik Teugels, Ijeoma Adaku Umelo and Jacques De Grève
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2012 10:28

    The Correction to this article has been published in BMC Medicine 2020 18:29