Dr. Venook on Looking Ahead at Treatment for CRC

Alan P. Venook, MD, The Madden Family Distinguished Professor of Medical Oncology and Translational Research at the University of California, San Francisco Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses future steps for treatment of patients with colorectal cancer (CRC).

Neither targeted therapies or immunotherapy should be the one-size-fits-all approach to treating patients with CRC, Venook explains. While it would be ideal to eliminate chemotherapy from the treatment landscape, there is a misconception that targeted therapies are not associated with any adverse events.

Additionally, Venook predicts that practitioners will eventually stage patients based on their biology versus conventional pathology. There are potentially 4 or 5 genetic subgroups of CRC that require individual treatment approaches, which will likely improve outcomes for patients going forward, he says.