# Small-cell lung cancer

Source: https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-rudin-nat-rev-dis-primers/  
OnCo record `paper-rudin-nat-rev-dis-primers` (Key paper). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Paper cited by one pathway page, indexed on Europe PMC as PubMed record 33446664 and published in Nature reviews. Disease primers; the citing page links this DOI, which is how the record was matched.

## Summary

Small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) represents about 15% of all lung cancers and is marked by an exceptionally high proliferative rate, strong predilection for early metastasis and poor prognosis. SCLC is strongly associated with exposure to tobacco carcinogens. Most patients have metastatic disease at diagnosis, with only one-third having earlier-stage disease that is amenable to potentially curative multimodality therapy. Genomic profiling of SCLC reveals extensive chromosomal rearrangements and a high mutation burden, almost always including functional inactivation of the tumour suppressor genes TP53 and RB1. Analyses of both human SCLC and murine models have defined subtypes of disease based on the relative expression of dominant transcriptional regulators and have also revealed substantial intratumoural heterogeneity. Aspects of this heterogeneity have been implicated in tumour evolution, metastasis and acquired therapeutic resistance. Although clinical progress in SCLC treatment has been notoriously slow, a better understanding of the biology of disease has uncovered novel vulnerabilities that might be amenable to targeted therapeutic approaches. The recent introduction of immune checkpoint blockade into the treatment of patients with SCLC is offering new hope, with a small subset of patients deriving prolonged benefit. Strategies to direct targeted therapies to those patients who are most likely to respond and to extend the durable benefit of effective antitumour immunity to a greater fraction of patients are urgently needed and are now being actively explored.

Indexed on Europe PMC as PubMed record 33446664 (DOI 10.1038/s41572-020-00235-0). Matched by DOI alone: one pathway page cites this DOI among its external links (the pages are listed under Related), and this page was written so that the citation resolves inside OnCo. No figure has been checked by an editor.

## Fields

- Kind: Key paper
- Last checked: 2026-09-22
- Tags: europepmc-ingest
- Journal: Nature reviews. Disease primers
- Year: 2021
- DOI: 10.1038/s41572-020-00235-0
- Authors: Rudin CM, Brambilla E, Faivre-Finn C, et al.
- What it means: One pathway page on OnCo cites this paper by its DOI; this record gives the citation a page of its own so a reader can follow it without leaving OnCo. Read the abstract above alongside the citing page listed under Related; the record was created automatically from the Europe PMC entry and its figures have not been checked by hand.
- Caveats: Matched to the citing OnCo records by DOI alone; the summary reproduces the Europe PMC abstract and no figure has been verified against the full paper.

## Sources

- Nat Rev Dis Primers 2021: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41572-020-00235-0
- PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33446664/
- Europe PMC: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/33446664

## Connected records

- pathways: [Small cell lung cancer (KEGG map)](https://onco.cc/pathways/sclc-signalling/)

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