Today, one in every 2 men and one in every 3 women living in the developed world will develop cancer at some stage in their lives. Lung cancer causes more deaths globally than breast, prostate and colon cancer combined. Although lung carcinoma has become the ‘poster child’ for personalized or precision cancer treatment very few patients are candidates for these treatments and all patients with advanced disease eventually develop progressive and drug resistant disease. This is a personal and societal burden that must be overcome by developing more and better treatment options as well as better assays for determining what patients will respond well to specific drugs and that can monitor patients response to the treatment. The use of such an assay in the clinic may reduce the exposure of low risk patients to unnecessary toxic therapy with side effects. Consequently, this will reduce the healthcare burden and cost as both low and high-risk patients are treated appropriately. This project will develop new targeted drugs to attack lung cancer. In particular it will examine the effect of a novel drug to kill lung cancer cells that are resistant to treatment. Most importantly we will optimised new tests that can be developed into diagnostic assays to allow the selection of the right patient at the right time for the right therapy.
