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NCCN Updates Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Guidelines

JENKINTOWN, Pa., October 23, 2007 — The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) announces important updates to the NCCN Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) Guidelines. The NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology™ are widely recognized and applied as the standard of care in oncology in the United States in both the community and the academic practice settings.

An entirely new section has been added to the NSCLC guidelines for Thymic Malignancies, which include thymomas and thymic carcinomas. The new section includes principles of surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy.

The postoperative adjuvant chemotherapy regimens for early-stage NSCLC have been expanded and clarified by providing additional cisplatin-based regimens and chemotherapy regimens to use for patients with comorbidities or patients not able to tolerate cisplatin. These alternatives are mainly carboplatin-based regimens.

Another update to the guidelines involves the use of molecular markers to individualize therapy for patients. Patients with NSCLC who have never smoked and whose tumors contain epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations will respond to tyrosine kinase inhibitors, such as erlotinib (Tarceva®, Genentech). Thus, the NCCN guidelines now state that clinicians can consider using erlotinib (with or without chemotherapy) for patients with advanced or metastatic cancer who have never smoked and whose tumors have a known active EGFR mutation.

NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology™ are developed and continually updated through an evidence-based process with explicit review of the scientific evidence by multidisciplinary panels of expert physicians from NCCN Member Institutions. The most recent version of this and all the guidelines are available free of charge at www.nccn.org.