Newswise — The primary cause of lung cancer is smoking. However, the incidence of lung cancer among never-smokers has been steadily increasing, especially among women. While approximately 80% of never-smoking lung cancer patients are prescribed targeted therapies that focus on mutations in proteins such as EGFR and ALK, the remaining patients often receive cytotoxic chemotherapy with high side effects and relatively low response rates, highlighting the urgent need for targeted therapies.
Dr. Lee Cheolju's team at the Chemical Life Convergence Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) , along with Dr. Kim Seon-Young's team at the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology and Dr.
Han Ji-Youn's team at the National Cancer Center, have elucidated the overexpression of estrogen signaling pathways in specific Korean never-smoking lung cancer cases using multi-omics analysis and proposed the anti-cancer drug saracatinib as a targeted therapeutic agent. Multi-omics integrates various molecular information, with proteomics presenting a particular challenge due to the need to analyze small amounts of proteins without loss, typically microgram-scale. The research team obtained tissue samples from 101 Korean never-smoking lung cancer patients without identified treatment targets among 1,597 patients who visited the National Cancer Center over the past decade and distributed clinical information, genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and phosph.
