This review discusses the rationale and clinical evidence of immunotherapy in SCLC, the conflictive clinical results of novel immunotherapeutic agents and combinatorial therapies under evaluation in SCLC patients.
The majority of data published to date, including the results of almost all large cohorts, are strongly supportive of the value of CTC enumeration as a predictor of survival, mainly in advanced/metastatic non-small and small cell lung cancer (NSCLC and SCLC, respectively).
While type I LCNECs and SCLCs exhibit a neuroendocrine profile with ASCL1<sup>high</sup>/DLL3<sup>high</sup>/NOTCH<sup>low</sup>, type II LCNECs bear TP53 and RB1 alterations and differ from most SCLC tumors with reduced neuroendocrine markers, a pattern of ASCL1<sup>low</sup>/DLL3<sup>low</sup>/NOTCH<sup>high</sup>, and an upregulation of immune-related pathways.
A higher incidence of Rhesus group D (RHD)-negative blood group among patients with Small Cell Cancer of the lung (SCLC) had been previously reported but reproducibility was not confirmed, and clinical relevance is undefined.
Notably, SCLC with mesenchymal phenotypes (i.e., loss of E-cadherin and high epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) signature scores) displayed striking alterations in expression of miR200 family and key SCLC genes (e.g., NEUROD1, ASCL1, ALDH1A1, MYCL1).
Strong concordance between clinical and ex vivo effects of ASO and cisplatin in SCLC supports the use of PDX models to prescreen promising anticancer agents prior to clinical testing in SCLC patients.
To investigate the clinicopathological significance of NQO1 expression and evaluate its role as a potential prognostic marker in SCLC, protein and mRNA expression levels of NQO1 were determined in four fresh tissue samples of SCLC and paired adjacent non-cancerous tissues using western blotting and real-time qRT-PCR, respectively, and 115 cases of SCLC with strict follow-up were selected for immunohistochemical (IHC) staining of NQO1 protein.
To develop a framework for development of specific SCLC-targeted drugs we conducted a combined genomic and pharmacological vulnerability screen in SCLC cell lines.
The studied series consisted of formalin-fixed-paraffin-embedded tissue samples from 70 patients diagnosed with NELT (2000-2006) including tumors of low malignancy potential (3 tumorlets, 33 typical carcinoids), intermediate malignancy potential (3 atypical carcinoids) and tumors of high malignancy potential (10 large cell neuroendocrine carcinomas-LCNEC and 21 small cell carcinoma-SCLC).
Chromosomal alterations, biological features and in vitro chemosensitivity of SCLC-R1, a new cell line from human metastatic small cell lung carcinoma.
They both expressed high concentrations of the SCLC marker enzymes neuron-specific enolase and the creatine kinase isoenzyme BB and showed no significant differences in their chromosomal characteristics. c-myc was amplified and expressed in both cell lines, and SCLC-21H had an additional rearranged and amplified EcoRI c-myc fragment.
Both UMC-SCLC-1 and UMC-SCLC-1A demonstrated the deletion of chromosome 3p, amplification and abundant expression of N-myc, and increased expression of c-raf.