Genomics of Relapsed Small Cell Lung Cancer Progression

Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) accounts for nearly 15% of all patients with lung cancer. Though the response to initial therapy is favorable in many patients, a majority of patients go on to develop recurrent disease which is very difficult to treat. The response rates to chemotherapy are very low and most patients succumb to relapsed SCLC within a few months. Virtually no progress has been made in the treatment of SCLC in the last three decades. In order to better understand the molecular alterations in relapsed SCLC, we have generated exome and rna sequence from normal, primary tumor and relapse tissues of SCLC patients.