What Is Adjuvant Therapy After Lung Cancer Surgery?

Adjuvant therapy refers to additional treatment — such as chemotherapy or targeted therapy — given after surgery, aimed at reducing the risk that cancer will recur.

Even after a tumor is successfully removed surgically, microscopic cancer cells may remain elsewhere in the body and eventually cause a recurrence. Adjuvant therapy is designed to reduce this risk by treating the body more broadly following surgery.

Targeted therapy has increasingly been studied in the adjuvant setting for lung cancer. Osimertinib, an EGFR-targeted therapy, was among the first targeted lung cancer drugs specifically studied in this after-surgery setting, aiming to prevent recurrence in patients whose tumors carried an EGFR mutation.

Whether and which adjuvant therapy is recommended depends on multiple factors, including cancer stage, biomarker results, and overall health — decisions made individually between a patient and their treatment team, not something this article can determine generally.