The big C takes a chunk out of human life, wherever it appears – in whatever form. The lost years and the lost productivity take their toll not just on individuals and their families – but the entire world.

While you may think of lung cancer as strictly a smoker’s disease, it can affect non-smokers as well. New gene discoveries are helping find better cancer treatments for both groups.

One of the huge challenges in lung cancer research is finding a good way to study the disease – to see how it develops and grows and changes. A new model may open the gateway to new discoveries.

A drug often used to treat kidney and liver cancer may also fight a type of lung cancer. New research, though, shows that it does not extend the lives of lung cancer patients.

About 5 percent of the 226,000 lung cancers diagnosed every year in the U.S. have a scrambled ALK gene. Usually people with this type of lung cancer are treated with chemotherapy. Now, another drug has been shown to be more effective.

People who don’t smoke shouldn’t die from smoke, but it happens everyday. Secondhand smoke exposure is an unnecessary risk that takes over 40,000 lives per year.

Scientists may have trouble proving it in a lab, but marital support helps cancer patients live longer. How can this be translated to help unmarried patients?

Lung cancer patients who never smoked may be treated differently in the future than those who have smoked. That’s because smoking changes a person’s genes – a lot.

What could possibly make death rates for foreign- and U.S.-born Hispanics with lung cancer patients different? Well, it’s not genetic differences, so what could it be?