Highlights from the 8th Central European Lung Cancer Conference

The 8th Central European Lung Cancer Conference held this year in Vienna was organized by the Austrian Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (AASLC) with the support of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC).

More than 500 medical professionals from Central, Eastern, and Western Europe, as well as from the United States, Canada, and Japan, attended this event. The sessions were dedicated to lung cancer epidemiology and prevention, pathology, treatment of nonsmall-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and small cell lung cancer (SCLC), and palliative therapy.

Doctors Rodrigo Hepp and Wilfried Eberhardt report, ‘although we have progressed in the molecular understanding of a complex disease such as lung cancer, more and more new questions are being raised. We are now at the beginning of a whole new era of therapy, with new molecular treatments leading to more specific targeting, tailored chemotherapy, and surgical interventions, as well as more sophisticated and normal-tissue-sparing radiation techniques. Nonetheless, we should never forget that lung cancer prevention should play the dominant role in the fight against this disease….. potentially more than 90% of the cases could be preventable’.