The latest version of the International Union Against Cancer (UICC) TNM staging criteria for malignant tumors will be promulgated and implemented in 2009. This is a major event in the field of global oncology research and treatment. It is an important guiding document to promote the development of a new round of oncology diagnosis and treatment technology, and will play an extremely important role in the cause of human anti-tumor. The new TNM staging criteria for lung cancer, as an important part of it, will also be released in 2009. Since the International Union Against Cancer (UICC) first promulgated the TNM staging in 1968, the TNM staging of lung cancer has been revised six times in more than 30 years, and the 6th edition of the UICC TNM staging of lung cancer currently used worldwide was promulgated in 2002. and the Lung Cancer Research Group of the National Cancer Institute developed after analyzing the data of 5319 lung cancer patients, and has been widely used in the clinical diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. However, there are still more opinions and differences in the industry regarding the current TNM staging. At present, most of the controversies over TNM staging are limited to some details within it, and no fundamental changes have been made. In actual clinical work, the survival rate of lung cancer patients with the same TNM stage varies greatly, and some patients with early TNM stage die within a short time after surgery. Can these patients survive longer if they are treated with supportive care? Even if their survival time is not prolonged, can they no longer suffer from surgery? Some patients with late TNM stage also have longer-term survival. The above phenomenon indicates that the current TNM staging of lung cancer does not fully reflect the essential biological behavior of lung cancer, and there are still many shortcomings, and new staging indicators and staging techniques are urgently needed. The establishment of a staging system that can objectively reflect the current status and prognosis of patients and accurate clinical and pathological staging can enable patients to receive adequate individualized treatment and effectively avoid the harm caused by overtreatment. The problems encountered in the clinical application of the current TNM staging, which has been used for more than 10 years, require us to revise the current TNM staging to further guide the clinical treatment of lung cancer. With the increasing global collaboration in lung cancer research, the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) proposed in 1998 that the TNM staging of lung cancer should be revised. The revision of the new staging involved not only researchers from lung cancer-related disciplines around the world, but also validation and methodological researchers, with very strict requirements and operational procedures from study design, case data collection to analysis of relevant factors. After more than 10 years of efforts, the new staging collected clinical data of 67,725 lung cancer patients from 46 research centers in 19 countries in Europe, North America, and Asia between 1990 and 2000, and the number of enrolled clinical cases far exceeded the total number of cases in the previous 6 editions, and was not limited to Europe and America. After drawing conclusions, the results were rigorously validated using existing database information. As a result, the new staging system will be more complete, extensive and authoritative. The general structure of the 7th edition is still similar to the 5th and 6th editions, but some changes have been made to the details, which are more scientific and convincing than the previous editions and can be more useful for guiding clinical work. For M1b; T2bN0M0 was changed from stage IB to stage IIA; T2aN1M0 was changed from stage IIB to stage IIA; T4N0-1M0 was changed from stage IIIB to stage IIIA. The new TNM staging also has its limitations. Since the study data were obtained from 46 research centers in 19 countries worldwide, monitoring of the authenticity and reliability of the data is more limited. The distribution of cases included in the study program is also uneven (58% in Europe, 7% in Australia, 21% in North America, and 14% in Asia), with no data from Africa, South America, or the Indian subcontinent; some countries with large populations (e.g., China, Russia, Indonesia) provide too small a proportion of the overall data to be representative. Treatment patterns vary considerably among study sites, leading to differences in treatment outcomes and having some impact on the final statistics of patient survival. The data collected for this study were from 1990 to 2000, whereas the 7th edition of the revised program began in 1998 and was primarily a retrospective study. Inevitably, individual study centers presented data in a biased manner, which affected the randomization and objectivity of the statistical results. In addition, researchers believe that more data are needed to verify the reliability of the revision. Although there are still many unsatisfactory aspects, the revised 7th edition is a great improvement over the 5th and 6th editions and will be the main basis for the development of the new UICC international TNM staging criteria for lung cancer in 2009. We believe that the new TNM staging system will make lung cancer staging more accurate and more suitable for clinical needs, thus accurately guiding the comprehensive treatment of lung cancer and predicting the prognosis of lung cancer patients, and better helping the majority of lung cancer patients.