Prognostic biomarkers in non-small-cell lung carcinoma

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the world. The vast majority are of the non-small-cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) histological type, for which the only effective treatment remains surgical resection. However, most of NSCLC are non-resectable at the time of diagnosis and some patients would benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy. Predicting the prognosis and the response to therapy requires identifying prognostic factors and therapeutic targets specific to each histological subtype of NSCLC and—ideally—of each patient. With the aim of compiling the most important prognostic biomarkers reported in the literature, this review focuses on those that can be investigated by in-situ approaches. These biomarkers are implicated in regulation of the cell cycle, resistance to apoptosis, immortality and—as recent discoveries on tyrosine kinase (TK) receptor mutations have led to promising clinical applications—in the TK signalling pathway.