Introduction

Lung cancer continues to be the most common cancer overall and the leading cause of cancer death in men worldwide, with an estimated 900,000 new cases and 810,000 deaths per year. It is also one of the most common causes of cancer deaths in women, second only to breast cancer worldwide.

The International Lung Cancer Consortium (ILCCO) is an international group of lung cancer researchers, established in 2004 with the aim of sharing comparable data from ongoing lung cancer case-control and cohort studies. Questionnaire data from a total of 26000 case-control pairs, and the biological samples from the majority of the subjects would be available. These studies are from different geographical areas and ethnicities. The overall objectives are to achieve greater power, especially for subgroup analyses, reduce duplication of research effort, replicate novel findings, and afford substantial cost savings through large collaborative efforts.

Working groups were formed to oversee research areas that were considered a priority for the consortium, including: (i) Genetic susceptibility, (ii) Young onset and family history, (iii) Never smokers, (iv) Rare histology, (v) somatic mutation, (vi) Statistics and the others. Please see Working Groups for the complete list of current working groups.

Future directions for the consortium include coordinated genotyping from a list of priority SNPs and whole genome scan in subgroups with stronger genetic background (e.g. subjects with young onset or with positive family history). We anticipate that ILCCO will be a major step toward improving our understanding of the causes and mechanisms of lung cancer and the beginning of a long-standing cooperation.

ILCCO Guidelines