Customizing systemic therapy in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Standard chemotherapy has been shown to improve quality of life and has a modest influence on overall survival. This modest improvement in survival is partly due to the choice of chemotherapy regimens that have been based on prognostic factors such as age, performance status and comorbidities of the patient. This underlines the importance of developing a more personalized therapy for patients with non-small cell lung cancer. Such an approach may reduce the variation in how individual patients respond to medications by tailoring therapies to their genetic profile. In this review we focus on several aspects of customized therapy, looking not only at patient characteristics but also to tumor histology and specific tumor biomarkers.