Concomitant EGFR Inhibitor Combined with Radiation for Non-small Cell Lung Carcinoma

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in the world (Jemal et al., 2009). Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for more than 80% percent of all cases of lung cancer. Surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy remain the three main regimens for the treatment of NSCLC. Over the past few years, molecular targeted agents, especially the EGFR inhibitors, have expanded the spectrum of rationale and practices for the treatment of advanced NSCLC. With the initiation of cancer genome project, advances have been made in the identification of oncogenic driver mutations in subsets of NSCLC patients. EGFR is considered to be one of the key members among the driver genes in Non-small cell lung cancer (An et al., 2012). Recent clinical trials such as IPASS, OPTIMAL, WJTOG3405, and NEJGSG002 demonstrated remarkable survival advantage and great promise for EGFR targeted therapeutics as first-line treatment (when used alone) for EGFR mutated NSCLC patients (Mok et al., 2009; Maemondo et al., 2010; Mitsudomi et al., 2010; Zhou et al., 2011). Although the great prospect had been shown in clinical investigations, EGFR inhibitors as the novel therapeutic agents are in themselves not curative by far, and almost all these NSCLC patients eventually develop resistance to small-molecule EGFR kinase inhibitors. Current researches focus on the development of new agents and the exploration of the integration of conventional therapies and targeted therapy. On the one hand, EGFR over expression was