Advance of theragnosis biomarkers in lung cancer: from clinical to molecular pathology and biology

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in men and women worldwide (1). Historically, it was divided in two major groups—small cell lung cancer (SCLC) and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with 80% to 85% of cases belonging to the latter group (2). Over the last years, however, the advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies and sequencing studies revealed that this classification is outdated and that particularly the term “non-small cell lung cancer” involves an extremely heterogeneous set of diseases at the molecular level that translates into both, tumors’ clinical behavior and therapeutic decision-making (3)