Molecular pathology of lung cancer: current status and future directions

The rapid development of targeted therapies has enormously changed the clinical management of lung cancer patients over the past decade; therefore, molecular testing, such as epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene mutations or anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene rearrangements, is now routinely used to predict the therapeutic responses in lung cancer patients. Moreover, as technology and knowledge supporting molecular testing is rapidly evolving, the landscape of targetable genomic alterations in lung cancer is expanding as well. This article will summarize the current state of the most commonly altered and most clinically relevant genes in lung cancer along with a brief review of potential future developments in molecular testing of lung cancer.