Approximately a quarter of patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is being diagnosed in an early stage of the disease and are amenable for a radical surgery. Despite radical surgery, the five-year survival rates for fully resected early stage NSCLC remains rather disappointing. To address this, several studies have assessed the use of adjuvant chemotherapy in an attempt to reduce the recurrence rate after surgery. Unfortunately, how-ever, the survival benefit obtained from adjuvant chemotherapy is somewhat modest, with approximately half of patients suffering a disease relapse. The identification of reliable predictive biomarkers for a response to targeted agents in the metastatic setting, the design of molecularly oriented studies, and the availability of novel potent and less toxic agents paves the way for the evaluation of these targeted agents in the (neo)adjuvant treatment of patients with earlier-stage NSCLC harboring an oncogenic driver mutation. The results obtained with this therapeutic strategy will be summarized in this article.
