The biology of lung cancer differs from one patient to the next, depending on age and sex, according to scientists at Duke University Medical Center. The findings may help explain why certain groups of patients do better than others, even though they appear to have the same disease.

“Our study supports two key findings: First, the biology of lung cancer in women is dramatically different from what we see in men. Women, in general, have a less complex disease, at least in terms of the numbers of molecular pathways involved. We also discovered that there is a subset of elderly patients would probably benefit from treatments that we’ve normally reserved for younger patients,” says Anil Potti, M.D., an oncologist in the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (IGSP) and the senior author of the study.