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Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Respirol. Jul 28, 2015; 5(2): 140-151
Published online Jul 28, 2015. doi: 10.5320/wjr.v5.i2.140
Unresectable stage III non-small-cell lung cancer: Have we made any progress?
Carolien De Tollenaere, Yolande Lievens, Katrien Vandecasteele, Karim Vermaelen, Veerle Surmont
Carolien De Tollenaere, Karim Vermaelen, Veerle Surmont, Department of Respiratory Medicine, University Hospital of Ghent, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Yolande Lievens, Katrien Vandecasteele, Department of Radiotherapy, University Hospital of Ghent, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Author contributions: All the authors equally contributed to this work.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Carolien De Tollenaere, MD, Department of Respiratory Medicine, University Hospital of Ghent, De Pintelaan 185, 9000 Ghent, Belgium. carolien.detollenaere@telenet.be
Telephone: +32-14-247276 Fax: +32-14-247276
Received: November 27, 2014
Peer-review started: November 28, 2014
First decision: December 12, 2014
Revised: March 27, 2015
Accepted: June 4, 2015
Article in press: June 8, 2015
Published online: July 28, 2015
Processing time: 249 Days and 9 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Lung cancer is responsible for the most cancer deaths. One third of patients have unresectable stage IIIA/IIIB disease. Despite a lot of efforts, local control and survival of these patients remains poor. Improving the treatment is therefore one of the biggest challenges in respiratory oncology. This review gives an overview of the important clinical studies that were performed the last decade in the treatment of unresectable stage III non-small-cell lung carcinoma and focuses on improvement of systemic therapy, with the exciting area of implementation of newer agents (targeted therapy and immunotherapy) and improvement of radiotherapy, including the potential of prophylactic cranial irradiation.