Method may inform personalized cancer treatments
Physicians treating patients with early-stage lung cancer face a conundrum: choosing potentially helpful yet toxic therapies such as chemotherapy, radiation or immunotherapy to knock out the cancer and lessen the risk of it spreading to the brain, or waiting to see if lung surgery alone proves sufficient. When up to 70% of such patients do not experience brain metastasis — the spread of cancer to the brain — the question arises: Who should receive additional aggressive treatments, and who can safely wait?