Inclusion criteria, exclusion criteria and study summary
Lung cancer is the most common cancer worldwide and the second most common cancer in the United Kingdom. The majority of patients in the UK (69%) are diagnosed at a late stage where curative treatment is not possible. In addition to treatments for cancer like chemotherapy and radiotherapy, in recent years another type of treatment that targets the immune system (immunotherapy) has shown promising results in improving the outcome for patients with many different cancers including lung cancer. Currently less than 50% of people benefit from this approach. This is the result of large gaps in our knowledge of how immunotherapy works and how to choose the right treatment or treatment combination for a particular patient. We will be looking at tissue from patients in whom there is a possibility there might be lung cancer or lung fibrosis. Lung fibrosis is not a cancer but shares some basis characteristics with lung cancer and looking at these samples will help our understanding of these diseases. We will compare these to samples collected from patients with lung nodules, other lung diseases and healthy lungs. We hope to be able to see if there are any particular immune or genetic markers that are related to the development of lung cancer and lung fibrosis, and to see if there are any markers we can potentially target with the outcome that the cancer or fibrosis may not develop, or may be made less harmful so we might be able to improve treatment for people with these diseases.
