EDITORIALS Combined-Modality Therapy for Unresectable,

(NSCLC) constitutes approximately one third of the more than 170 000 cases of bronchogenic carcinoma diagnosed each year in the United States. Typically, patients with this disease are treated with thoracic irradiation, usually as a single modality. Although radiotherapy is beneficial in terms of symptom pallia-tion and modest prolongation of life, cure is exceedingly rare, largely because of the eventual development of extrathoracic metastatic disease (1,2). In light of this well-recognized pattern of treatment failure, strategies that combine radiotherapy with chemotherapy have undergone extensive investigation during the past decade with both positive (3,4) and negative (5-8) results. These divergent results are usually attributed to differen-ces in the patient population studied and in the composition of the induction chemotherapy regimens. Six years ago, the first successful use of a combined-modality therapy in patients wit