Medical Oncology Department, La Fe University Hospital, Valencia, Spain.
Clin Transl Oncol. 2010 Aug;12(8):521-5. doi: 10.1007/s12094-010-0549-x.
New treatments have recently been introduced for treating non-small-cell lung cancer. Chemotherapeutic agents, such as pemetrexed, and targeted therapies, such as bevacizumab, erlotinib or gefitinib, have extended treatment options for selected histological subgroups. Antiangiogenic treatments, either associated with conventional chemotherapeutic drugs or given alone as maintenance therapy, constitute an active clinical research field. However, not all lung cancer patients benefit from antiangiogenic compounds. Moreover, tumour response assessment is often difficult when using these drugs, since targeted therapies generally do not cause rapid and measurable tumour shrinkage but, rather, long stabilisations and slight density changes on imaging tests. The finding of clinical or biological factors that might identify patients who will better benefit from these treatments, as well as identifying surrogate markers of tumour response and prognosis, is an issue of great interest. In that sense, different research lines have investigated the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and the vascular endothelial growth factor receptor (VEGFR) pathways. Circulating endothelial (CECs) and endothelial progenitor cells (CEPCs) are of prognostic value in different types of cancers, and relevant data are published about their potential usefulness as predictors of response to chemotherapy and antiangiogenic treatments. In this review, we discuss the data available on the role of CECs and CEPCs as prognostic factors and as surrogate markers of treatment response in non-small-cell lung cancer.
最近已经引入了新的治疗方法来治疗非小细胞肺癌。化疗药物，如培美曲塞，以及靶向治疗药物，如贝伐单抗、厄洛替尼或吉非替尼，已经为选定的组织学亚组扩展了治疗选择。抗血管生成治疗，无论是与常规化疗药物联合使用还是单独作为维持治疗，都是一个活跃的临床研究领域。然而，并非所有肺癌患者都能从抗血管生成化合物中受益。此外，由于靶向治疗通常不会导致肿瘤迅速和可测量的缩小，而是导致长期稳定和影像学检查上的轻微密度变化，因此这些药物的肿瘤反应评估通常很困难。发现可能识别哪些患者将从这些治疗中获益更多的临床或生物学因素，以及识别肿瘤反应和预后的替代标志物，是一个非常关注的问题。在这方面，不同的研究方向已经研究了表皮生长因子受体（EGFR）和血管内皮生长因子受体（VEGFR）途径。循环内皮细胞（CECs）和内皮祖细胞（CEPCs）在不同类型的癌症中具有预后价值，并且已经发表了关于它们作为化疗和抗血管生成治疗反应预测因子的潜在有用性的相关数据。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了 CECs 和 CEPCs 作为非小细胞肺癌预后因素和治疗反应替代标志物的现有数据。
