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Personalized, individualized, targeted therapy has successfully found entrance in the palliative treatment of lung cancer as they enable a personalized and individualized strategy going ahead with biomarker testing. Due to the crescending amount of predictive molecular and immunhistochemical analyses at different time points during therapy the need for more and actual tumor tissue increases; however these samples cannot always be obtained without major discomfort for the patients. Therefore, analyses from blood, the so called "liquid biopsy", is an alternative or additional method. Activating mutations in the EGFR gene and the inhibitory mutation T790 M can already be detected from blood during clinical routine. This review presents the status of liquid biopsy for diagnosis, prognosis and as predictive parameter during the course of therapy in lung cancer and gives an outlook on future developments.

Therapeutic decisions for breast cancer are increasingly becoming based on subtype-specific gene expression tests. For bladder cancer very similar subtypes have been identified by genome-wide mRNA analysis, which as for breast cancer differ with respect to the prognosis and response to therapy on the basis of their hormone dependency. At the DNA level, however, the type of mutations and their frequencies within the subtypes are strikingly different between bladder and breast cancers. It will be interesting to see whether possible driver mutations can serve as therapeutic targets in both indications. In contrast, the apparent hormone dependency of a substantial number of bladder carcinomas suggests that hormonal and anti-hormonal treatment can be valid therapy options similar to breast cancer. Moreover, gender-specific differences with respect to the incidence and aggressiveness of male compared to female bladder cancers can be explained by hormonal effects. Together with forthcoming immunomodulatory therapies these multiple therapy options raise and give new hope to efficiently combat this aggressive disease.

Though tobacco smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer, during the last decades the prevalence increased in never smoking patients, especially in women. Sex steroid hormones and particularly the estrogen receptors (ERs) seem to play an important but still underestimated role in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Beside long existing hints that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) increases the risk of lung tumors recent analyses on cell lines, xenografts and human tumors of both sexes gave clear evidence of ER expression and proliferation in NSCLC. Most recently, the expression of ERs apparently has prognostic and predictive value. Recently, an intracellular "cross-talk" between the ER and the epithelial growth factor receptor (EGFR) could be demonstrated. EGFR are important targets of approved tyrosinkinases (TKIs), like gefitinib, erlotinib or afatinib. Currently, clinical studies are enrolling lung tumor patients for combination treatment with EGFR TKI and antihormonal drugs, e. g. fulvestrant.