Lung Cancer Registry

Lung cancer is the second most common cancer in Austria with 2.868 men and 2.009 women diagnosed in 2016. Reflecting the high mortality of this disease, 2.415 men and 1.534 women died from lung cancer. Therefore, lung cancer is the most common reason for cancer associated death in men and second most common reason in women.

This malignant disease can be divided into two main groups: small cell lung cancer (SCLC) and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). NSCLC is a paradigm for personalized medicine, with an increasing number of targetable gene alterations. Despite this growing diversity of molecular subtypes, in most patients no targetable mutation can be detected. For these patients check-point inhibitors with or without chemotherapy is the mainstay of the initial tumor therapy. Until recently, little progress has been made in the treatment of SCLC in last decades. Recently, an overall survival benefit by the addition of an immune-checkpoint inhibitor to first-line chemotherapy for advanced SCLC has been reported.

Despite the progress in the treatment of NSCLC, the performance of predictive biomarkers is weak. Therefore, the development of more precise prediction models is of great importance for the progress of personalized treatment strategies.