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5 slides generated from the cancer page, with a quiz from the open benchmark and speaker notes that cite the sources. Arrow keys move between slides; Print gives one slide per page.
Lymphoepithelial carcinoma of the lung is a rare lung cancer, seen mostly in East Asian non-smokers, in which cancer cells sit in a dense crowd of immune cells and usually carry the Epstein-Barr virus, like nasopharyngeal cancer. It is treated as a squamous lung cancer, and its high PD-L1 levels have made immunotherapy a natural choice.
The 2021 WHO classification moved lymphoepithelial carcinoma from the large cell group into squamous cell carcinoma, on the strength of its squamous immunophenotype (Nicholson 2022). Histologically it is a poorly differentiated carcinoma with a heavy lymphocytic infiltrate, and in East Asian patients it is nearly always associated with Epstein-Barr virus. In 66 patients from Taiwan, PD-L1 was overexpressed in 75.8 percent of tumours and EGFR mutation found in 12.1 percent, with no KRAS, BRAF, ALK or ROS1 alterations (Chang 2015). Targeted sequencing of 27 Chinese cases found no classic lung driver apart from one ERBB2 amplification and one KRAS mutation, but mutations in epigenetic regulators in 78 percent (Modern Pathology 2020).
How it differs from its parent: it lacks the smoking-related mutational burden of ordinary squamous cell carcinoma, is virus-associated, and has a better reported prognosis in the series above; its biology is closer to nasopharyngeal carcinoma, which the corpus covers.
| Setting | Approach | Guideline |
|---|---|---|
| All stages | Treated as squamous cell carcinoma of the lung; checkpoint inhibitors in advanced disease on the PD-L1 findings, without a dedicated trial. | not mapped |