What Is the Lung Cancer Research Progress Tracker? How Our Free Tool Works

The Lung Cancer Research Progress Tracker is a free tool that queries the public ClinicalTrials.gov database live, in your browser, and displays how many active U.S. lung cancer clinical trials exist right now, broken down into six treatment categories.

The tool works by sending a real-time query to the ClinicalTrials.gov public API — the same database maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine that hospitals, researchers, and journalists use — and counting how many currently recruiting or active trials match each of six treatment categories: immunotherapy, targeted therapy, cell and gene therapy, cancer vaccines, antibody-drug conjugates, and early detection/screening research.

Each category is then scored from 0 to 100 relative to whichever category currently has the most active trials, giving you an at-a-glance sense of where research effort is currently concentrated. A higher score means more concurrent trial activity in that category — it does not mean that category is more likely to help any specific person, and it is not a ranking of treatment quality.

You can also filter by a specific molecular pathway — EGFR, ALK, KRAS, ROS1, MET exon 14, or small cell lung cancer generally — to see how many active trials currently reference that pathway. This is still aggregate, public data; it is not a personal eligibility match, and it does not evaluate whether any particular trial would accept any particular person.

If the live ClinicalTrials.gov query cannot complete (for example, due to a temporary connectivity issue), the tool falls back to a cached reference dataset and clearly labels it as such, so you always know whether you're looking at live or cached numbers.