When cancer is caught at Stage I, there are several highly successful, targeted treatment paths available. This page outlines the standards of care for early-stage lung cancer, including surgery, radiation, and advanced systemic therapies. Understanding these choices will help you feel confident and informed when discussing the next steps with your medical team.
For Stage I lung cancer, treatment is focused on completely removing or destroying the tumor. This video outlines the established standards of care and provides a clear benchmark for what clinical guidelines recommend for early-stage diagnoses.
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Surgery is often the primary and most effective treatment option for Stage I NSCLC. This video breaks down the different types of surgical procedures and explains how your surgeon decides which approach gives you the best possible outcome.
Radiation therapy is a powerful, non-invasive alternative to surgery that uses targeted energy to destroy cancer cells. In these videos, specialists discuss how radiation therapy fits into a treatment plan.
Chemotherapy is a treatment that uses drugs to stop the growth of cancer cells. Chemotherapy also attacks healthy cells.
Sometimes, fighting lung cancer requires treating the whole body to prevent the disease from returning. Here, cancer specialists explain the roles of chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and targeted therapies, including the difference between receiving treatments before surgery (neoadjuvant) versus after surgery (adjuvant).
Targeted therapy is a type of treatment that finds and attacks certain parts of cancer cells and the signals sent to cancer cells that cause them to grow uncontrollably. They prevent the growth of cancer cells only and do not harm healthy cells.
A targeted therapy works to control a specific biomarker, so it can only treat patients with that specific biomarker. Targeted therapy may be used after surgery in patients with a known biomarker.
Immunotherapy is a type of treatment that helps your immune system find and attack lung cancer. It is already a standard-of-care treatment for patients with NSCLC.
Many of the FDA-approved immunotherapies target another type of biomarker called PD-1/PD-L1. Because research has found PD-L1 biomarkers along with NSCLC mutations in patient tumor samples, clinical trials are now learning if immunotherapy works to treat different types of NSCLC mutations. Other clinical trials are underway to look at combinations of targeted therapy and immunotherapy for treatment of various NSCLC subtypes. However, it is important to wait for biomarker testing results before initiating treatment for NSCLC because, in some cases, it can be harmful to start immunotherapy if driver mutations are present. Immunotherapy may be given with chemotherapy.
Clinical trials are not just a last resort; they represent the absolute cutting edge of modern cancer medicine. In these videos, healthcare providers demystify the different phases of clinical trials and highlight how recent discoveries are changing the way early-stage lung cancer is treated.
