The Significance
Lung cancer is a major public health hazard. The global burden of lung cancer is a death every 4 seconds, round the clock, 365 days a year, with a global incidence estimated at 1,350,000 in 2002 Within the United States, it kills more than 160,000 men and women every year. A troubling dimension of the epidemiology of this disease is that 70-80% of patients with lung cancer have either locally-advanced or metastatic disease upon diagnosis. The 5 year survival rate after the initial diagnosis is only about 15% in the US. This grim reality demands better understanding of the molecular basis of lung cancer pathogenesis and urgently requires innovative therapeutic strategies in order to achieve substantially improved treatment outcomes.
Theme
The central theme of our program is to capitalize on our improved understanding of lung cancer cell signaling mechanisms involving mTOR and related pathways in order to discover and exploit innovative clinical and therapeutic strategies for treating lung cancer.
The Emory lung cancer program aims at translating target-directed therapeutic opportunities into clinical gains. The long-term goal is to develop effective clinical approaches to prevent, treat, and cure lung cancer. To achieve this goal, our team approach involves an integrated three-pronged strategy: (i) to enhance the efficacy of existing therapeutics for NSCLC, (ii) to carry out translational clinical investigations on emerging classes of target-directed agents for NSCLC with a particular focus on mTOR inhibitors, and (iii) to explore potential therapeutic applications of emerging new targets with a particular focus on cell survival signaling modulators. The principles uncovered from our integrated studies on lung cancer may also shed light on the development of therapeutic strategies for other solid tumors.
News
Congratulations to Dr. Fadlo Khuri for his election to the American Society of Clinical Investigation!
Every Breath You Take Golf Tournament Nets $130,000 for Lung Cancer Research
Dr. Shi-Yong Sun awarded new NIH/NCI RO1
Lung Cancer P01 Funded!
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by Robert Fu