Identifying Biomarkers of Lung Cancer in the Post-Genomic Era

In the last two decades, we have witnessed an exponential growth of our knowledge on cell growth and neoplastic transformation at the molecular level. There is high expectation that these advances will be translated into further improvement in the care of cancer patients, especially in the areas of diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. With the completion of the human genome project and numerous studies on gene expression analyses in lung cancer, our challenge is to understand the tumor morphological changes at the molecular level, which will ultimately lead to novel approaches for patient care. This review will summarize methods for identifying biomarkers of lung cancer and molecular/genetic changes that have been investigated as candidate diagnostic, prognostic and predictive markers for lung cancer. A more concerted and global approach to study the clinical relevance of molecular changes in lung cancers is required in the future.