"Doubt is our product," stated a tobacco industry memo from 1969. For half a century, the tobacco industry tried to muddy the link between smoking and cancer. Now, with that effort long since failed, cigarette producers facing dozens of potentially ruinous lawsuits are once again attempting to manufacture doubt.

Not all lung cancer is due to a lifetime of smoking cigarettes. Sometimes the diagnosis is a mystery, and the stigma surrounding the disease makes it hard for patients to talk about. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Northern California Cancer Center have taken the first steps toward analyzing why people who never smoked get lung cancer.

In an era when lung cancer remains the most lethal cancer, accounting for more deaths than colon, breast and prostate cancer combined -- and surgery, when possible, is the most effective treatment -- Mayo Clinic surgeons have proposed a system of lung surgery quality indicators for surgeons and the public as a method to demonstrate best practices for obtaining positive patient outcomes.

Antibodies that selectively bind and destroy cancer cells represent some of the most promising cancer therapy approaches being developed today. Several of these antibodies have reached the market, including cetuximab (Erbitux®, ImClone Systems), which targets the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) protein.

DNA coughed up along with phlegm could point to lung cancer, say researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who are developing an inexpensive and non-invasive gene probe to help diagnose early stage lung cancer in current and former smokers.

The US Surgeon General, US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Radon Program at the Rhode Island Department of Health (HEALTH) recommend that all homes be tested for radon.

Combination gene therapy delivered in lipid-based nanoparticles drastically reduces the number and size of human non-small cell lung cancer tumors in mice, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center report in the Jan. 15 edition of Cancer Research.

To promote National Radon Action Month and make it easier for Nebraskans to test their homes for radon, the Health and Human Services System will offer low-cost radon test kits during January.

A longer, less intense course of radiotherapy provides better value for the money than a shorter, more intense regimen when given to ease pain and other complaints in patients with late-stage non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to a study in the December 20 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.