The new approach could eventually allow clinicians to monitor how the disease changes during treatment through a simple blood test, according to the study’s senior author Anish Thomas, M.D., the Roswell Park Professor of Hematology and Oncology.
“Although SCLC has historically been treated largely as a single disease, we now recognize that there are important biological differences between tumors,” said Thomas, also a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University. “Understanding these differences is essential to developing more effective treatments.”