Collaborative Advanced Stage Tissue Lung Cancer (CASTLE) Network

Because of the historically poor outcomes of lung cancer patients, suboptimal therapeutic efficacy, and significant side effects of chemotherapy, and the need to choose more efficacious treatment regimens, and patients most likely to benefit from them, there is a need to predict a priori whether an individual patient's tumor will respond to a particular therapeutic agent. However, virtually all lung cancer tumor samples available today are from resection specimens so direct, intra-patient molecular-clinical therapy correlations are impossible. Without the critical mass of tissue and data necessary to identify optimal molecular targets for lung cancer and drugs active against these targets, new discoveries that offer the only hope of long-term survival for many lung cancer patients remain elusive. This study facilitates the collection of biospecimens from advanced lung cancer patients and routine determination of a panel of documented clinically significant biomarkers. In addition, it will centrally integrate and standardize research tissue samples with corresponding proteomic, genomic, molecular and clinical data across a multitude of institutions and oncology networks