Dr. Ilson on the Future Treatment Paradigm of Gastric Cancers

David H. Ilson, MD, PhD, medical oncologist, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses how the treatment paradigm of gastric cancers will evolve in the future.

Perioperative chemotherapy is an accepted standard of care in a subset of patients and it is likely that this will not change as further research is conducted, Ilson explains. However, for higher-grade tumors, adding radiation therapy to perioperative chemotherapy may improve outcomes.

Future treatment options will be comprised of more targeted therapies, included HER2-targeted agents with chemoradiation, Ilson says. Immunotherapy may also begin having a more prominent role. While MET and EGFR did not prove to be useful biomarkers in this disease, he adds that HER2 is the only validated biomarker thus far for metastatic disease. It has not yet been confirmed whether HER2-targeted therapy will improve outcomes for patients with locally advanced disease.