Comparison of the transcriptomic profiles of small cell lung cancer (SCLC) patients who are younger or have never smoked

Small cell lung cancer is a type of aggressive lung cancer. Over ten thousand people are diagnosed with it each year in the United States. Almost all patients diagnosed with small cell lung cancer have a strong history of tobacco use. There are some patients without a history of tobacco use who develop small cell lung cancer, these patients tend to be younger. We seek to understand this population of patients better by comparing their age, sex and other clinical features to others with small cell lung cancer. We also want to look at biomarkers detected in the cancer cells to see if they are different between the patients with and without tobacco use. These biomarkers are proteins and genes. Transcriptomic profiles show which genes are active in a person's cells. We believe that the different groups we will study may have different sets of active genes, and studying these differences could help us better understand how the tumor behaves and grows.

We are going to look at the clinical features of the patients who were treated on the CASPIAN clinical trial. As part of this trial, many of the patients had cancer biomarkers (proteins and genes) analyzed. We would like to compare these biomarkers between the two groups, and see if any are preferentially higher or lower in one group than the other.

This research is important because it might help us understand whether this subset of small cell lung cancer is different from the more common type associated with tobacco use and older age. These findings may spur additional research on whether these types of small cell lung cancer should be treated differently.