• Explain to patients that a targeted therapy resulted in better outcomes than chemotherapy for selected patients with nonsmall-cell lung cancer.
• The subset of patients who benefited from the targeted agent account for a minority of the entire population of patients with NSCLC.

Targeted therapy with gefitinib (Iressa) led to a fourfold improvement in progression-free survival, compared with chemotherapy in selected patients with nonsmall-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), a multinational group of Asian investigators reported.

The 12-month progression-free survival was 24.9% with the inhibitor of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR),versus 6.7% with carboplatin-paclitaxel chemotherapy. The best results occurred in patients with mutated EGFR.

The trial was limited to nonsmokers and former light smokers (defined as <10 pack-years) with advanced pulmonary adenocarcinoma, according to an article published online in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“This study shows that first-line therapy with gefitinib as compared with carboplatin-paclitaxel prolongs progression-free survival, increases the objective response rate, and improves quality of life among clinically selected patients with nonsmall-cell lung cancer,” Tony S. Mok, MD, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and colleagues concluded.