The patients will be treated with erlotinib and bevacizumab for a six-week period. Imaging
procedures will be performed at baseline, after one week of therapy and after the six weeks
of treatment.
The combination of erlotinib and bevacizumab represents an effective therapeutic strategy in
NSCLC with the highest response rates ever reported for relapsed NSCLC having been observed
recently in a phase II trial. Early differentiation of patients profiting and of patients not
profiting from this therapy is of major relevance for further improving this targeted therapy
approach and to develop more effective, personalized treatment strategies. We aim at this
early identification by the combination of molecular and functional imaging tools (FDG-,
FLT-PET, DCE-MRI), molecular marker analyses in tissue and peripheral blood (EGFR- and KRAS
mutational status and high throughput mutational profiling in tumor tissue,
angiogenesis-associated biomarkers and expression profiling in peripheral blood) and
pharmokokinetic analyses. From the combined analyses of these tools we expect a better
understanding of the host-drug interaction as a precondition for further improvement of
erlotinib-bevacizumab combination therapy in NSCLC