Genomic alterations in small cell lung cancer and their clinical relevance

We thank Karachaliou et al. for their insightful editorial (1) regarding genomic studies on small cell lung cancer (SCLC), which included analysis of our own recent study (2). They raise several interesting points, such as the potential use of ARID1A mutations and alterations in the PIK3-AKT-mTOR pathway as biomarkers for response to PARP inhibition, that support the idea that real therapeutic progress against this cancer can be gained from genomic studies. The authors specifically pointed out two of our results, however, which they found inconsistent with previous genomic studies of SCLC. The first was our finding that only 58% of our patient cohort carried exome mutations in RB1.