Improving post-resection risk stratification in non-small cell lung cancer: ‘wit, whither wander you?’

With an annual worldwide burden of 1.6 million new cases and 1.4 million deaths, and with the rapid penetration of tobacco use into some of the most population-dense regions of the world including East and South Asia, lung cancer, the greatest oncologic public health challenge of this age, will remain so for generations to come (1). Despite encouraging progress in our knowledge of cancer biology which has provided a rich harvest of increasingly more effective drug treatments for patients with advanced disease, the stark reality is that the aggregate 5-year overall survival (OS) of all patients diagnosed annually with lung cancer remains only about 18% at best (2).