The death rate of lung cancer is the world highest among all cancers. Non-small cell lung cancer, which accounts for most of this fatal lung cancer, is almost impossible to diagnose in the early stage, and even if it was treated surgically in the first stage, the reoccurrence rate is 40-50% of the patients, who end up dying after all. For lung cancer treatment, targeted agents that aim at Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) such as Gefitinib and Erlotinib are commonly used in addition to cytotoxic agents. In particular, agents targeting Anaplasitc lymphoma Kinase (ALK) such as Crizotinib are recently used in the clinical level. Such targeted agents, however, may work properly only when a peculiar biomarker is produced in the tumor, and most of the lung cancer patients start developing resistance to the agents within 6 months to 1 year although they may show excellent treatment effects in the early stage. After that period, there is no more treatment available. Hence, studies on strategies for better efficacy of such targeted agents and overcoming such resistance to agents are actively conducted around the world as an imminent issue to be addressed. In addition, the study on mechanisms of resistance to targeted agents is of great importance in that they can lead to developing new targeted agents as well as biomarkers to them.

The research center is putting forth consistent effort to demonstrate mechanisms of resistance to overcome the difficulties in treatment due to the resistance to targeted agents in the clinical level through industry-academic cooperation, various in vitro experiments, in vivo experiments, and genetically engineered mice. The results are applied clinically to develop treatment methods for patients struggling with cancer.