The Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of northwestern university at northwestern Memorial Hospital

Top Surgeons
For roughly one in four patients diagnosed
with lung cancer, surgery is a viable treatment.
At Northwestern Memorial, thoracic surgeons 
perform 70 percent of all lobectomies and
90 percent of surgeries in patients with Stage 1 
disease with a minimally invasive technique 
called video-assisted thoracic surgery, or VATS. 
During VATS, a tiny video camera and surgical 
instruments are inserted through three small 
incisions in the chest. While viewing the inside 
of the chest on a video screen, the surgeon 
dissects out the critical structures, including
the lobe of the lung containing the tumor and 
the nearby lymph nodes and places it all in
a bag that is slipped out through one of the 
incisions. “We’re doing anatomically the exact 
same operation we would do with open surgery, 
but through very small incisions that don’t 
disrupt the muscular or skeletal part of the
chest wall,” says Dr. DeCamp. VATS, which
is used nationally in about 25 percent of 
lobectomies, results in a shorter hospital stay, 
less time on pain medication and the ability
for patients to get back to their lives and work 
much sooner, according to Dr. DeCamp.
Radiation and Chemotherapy
For patients with early-stage disease who are 
unable to undergo surgery and those with more 
advanced lung cancer, we offer a variety of 
state-of-the-art radiological treatment options. 
Stereotactic body radiosurgery, a painless, 
nonsurgical outpatient treatment, delivers 
intense, targeted beams of radiation to destroy 
small, well-defined tumors while sparing 
surrounding healthy tissue. “This advanced 
technique is likely to grow in importance as
CT scans turn up more early stage lung cancers 
among patients who are not candidates for 
surgery,” says Steven B. Newman, MD, 
hematologist/oncologist on the medical staff
at Northwestern Memorial and associate 
professor of Hematology/Oncology at Feinberg. 
The standard of care in patients with locally 
advanced disease is intensity-modulated 
radiotherapy, an external beam radiation that 
delivers a custom tailored dose of radiation 
based on tumor size, shape and location to 
maximize the amount of radiation and minimize 
toxicity to structures in the chest.
Most patients with early-stage disease undergo 
chemotherapy and great progress is being 
made to individualize treatment with new, more 
effective drugs to match the microscopic 
structure of a particular tumor. In patients with 
Stage 4 disease, thoracic pathologists and 
oncologists can take a tiny biopsy of a tumor, 
sequence it and identify a genetic alteration
or oncologic driver. “When we find these 
mutations, we can prescribe a rationally 
designed targeted drug that essentially turns 
Colin T. Gillespie, MD
Steven B. Newman, MD

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the tumor off,” says Jyoti D. Patel, MD oncologist
on the medical staff at Northwestern Memorial
and associate professor of Hematology/Oncology 
at Feinberg. “With these new drugs, we can see 
responses within a week.”