Adjuvant therapy for resected non-small-cell lung cancer: past, present, and future

Non-small-cell lung cancer has the highest mortality of all malignancies worldwide. Unfortunately, only the minority of patients diagnosed will have potentially curable disease. Over the past 30 years, dozens of trials have been conducted assessing adjuvant treatments to augment the survival advantage offered by surgery. It has only been in the past 5 years that promising results have begun to be seen. Cisplatin-based therapy has now been shown to provide an additional survival benefit in several trials and in a recent meta-analysis. The goal of this paper is to review the data on adjuvant therapies that have emerged over the past 30 years, focusing specifically on the trials that have been published in the past 5 years.