EGFR and non-small cell lung carcinoma: Although erlotinib significantly delays cancer progression in the targeted treatment of NSCLC, like the other two first-generation EGFR inhibitors, gefitinib (Cohen et al., 2003; Zhang et al., 2017), (Figure 1, 2) and icotinib(Shi et al., 2013; Mao et al., 2020) (Figure 1, 3), drug resistance starts to appear after about 9–14 months of application, and almost all tumors begin to re-grow(Ayyappan et al., 2013).