The Cover

Light microscopy, a tool developed centuries age, has historically proven to be the single most useful tool to discriminate clinically relevant subsets of human lung cancer. Global analysis of gene expression patterns can make these distinctions with extremely high accuracy even in a blinded test cohort, as shown in this comparison of patterns from resected early stage adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma of the lung. This technology promises to enable refined and clinically useful subclassifications of lung cancer and potentially to identify novel mechanisms underlying cancer biology and potential new therapeutic targets. For details, see N. Yamagata et al., in this issue.