Chapel Hill, NC - Juneka Grilley-Olson, MD, clinical fellow in the UNC School of Medicine’s division of hematology and oncology, will present a poster-discussion at the 13th World Conference of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (WCLC) on July 31, 2009. Her poster is about her work on factors that affect how different pathologists diagnose non-small cell lung cancer.

Historically, lung cancer has been divided, for treatment purposes, into 'small cell' and 'non-small cell' lung cancers. Only very recently have physicians been able to select chemotherapies based on subtypes of 'non-small cell lung cancer,” so it’s key that all pathologists agree on characteristics for reliable diagnoses of non-small cell lung cancer subtypes so that the best treatment plan can be developed and for developing and evaluating clinical trials for these subtypes of lung cancer.

Grilley-Olson and other UNC scientists surveyed academic and community pathologists to assess their level of agreement in assigning diagnoses. Earlier this year at the annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO), Grilley-Olson made a presentation on data for the key practice distinction on squamous cell carcinoma (a subtype of non-small cell lung cancer) versus all other types of non-small cell lung cancer. Now, at the WCLC meeting in San Francisco, she'll be presenting characteristics that affect agreement among pathologists as well as expanding upon her original ASCO findings.