Patients with advanced disease who have an adequate performance status clearly benefit from systemic chemotherapy, and many clinical trials have been carried out to determine the most effective regimen. Comorbidities associated with NSCLC preclude the use of cisplatin in doublet therapies, and, a meta-analysis comparing platinum-based doublet regimens to non-platinum based, third generation regimens revealed that survival outcomes between these regimens were equivalent. Despite poor response and overall survival benefits in this patient population with accepted treatment doublets, the addition of a third cytotoxic agent did not improve survival and demonstrated increased toxicity. Therefore, it appears a threshold maximum response can be gained with cytotoxic chemotherapy alone. However, the poor outcomes still associated with advanced NSCLC clearly demanded the need for continued improvements in treatment. It was postulated that anticancer therapy could be significantly improved by not only targeting the tumor cells directly, but also by targeting neo-angiogenesis. A randomized phase II trial demonstrated a significant improvement in time to progression (TTP) in patients receiving carboplatin, paclitaxel and bevacizumab compared to chemotherapy alone. Due to life-threatening and fatal hemorrhage patients with squamous cell histology, as well as those with a prior history of hemoptysis and brain metastases were excluded from all further clinical trials using bevacizumab. The definitive study of bevacizumab in NSCLC was a randomized phase III clinical trial conducted by ECOG (E4599) in which patients with advanced non-squamous NSCLC received carboplatin + paclitaxel with or without bevacizumab which met the clinical endpoint of improvement in survival and led to the approval of bevacizumab in first line treatment in patients with advanced NSCLC with non-squamous histology.