Eosinophils in non-small cell lung cancer

For many years lung cancer has been and, today, still remains one of the principal cancer types across the world. It is also the leading cause of cancer-related death. For those and other reasons detailed in the next section, the burden of lung cancer is even increasing, explaining intensive clinical, translational, and fundamental research efforts.
The advent of immunotherapy has led to a paradigm shift in cancer treatment with its fundamentally different approach to cancer. Since its advent, cure and long-term survivorship can be seen among patients treated with this class of medication for their disease, even in an advanced stage. Particularly since the introduction of immune checkpoint inhibitors, the most commonly used type of immunotherapy, clinicians have reported an observed relationship between blood eosinophilia and clinical outcomes.
Along with these developments in oncology, eosinophils and eosinophil-related cytokines, e.g., interleukin-5 proved to be meaningful targets in the treatment of severe asthma and, more recently, in subsets of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
With this work, we aimed at expanding the clinical data on blood eosinophils in patients suffering from the most frequent subtype of lung cancer, i.e., non-small cell lung cancer. First, we studied blood eosinophilia in the context of immune checkpoint inhibitors used for advanced stages of disease. Then, we focused on tissue eosinophils in early stage, resected non- small cell lung cancer.