OeGHO annual meeting 2023—best of oncology

The years 2022/2023 overwhelmed us with plenty of novel, clinically relevant study data in the field of medical oncology. At this year’s spring meeting of the Austrian Society of Hematology and Oncology (April 2023), I was honored to summarize some of the most promising results presented at the most prominent scientific meetings within the last 12 months. Starting with gastrointestinal oncology, results of the KEYNOTE-859 first-line phase III study confirmed the efficacy of combination of pembrolizumab and chemotherapy in gastric cancer patients especially in PD-L1-positive and microsatellite instable (MSI) tumors. In the SPOTLIGHT phase III study, the addition of the anti-claudin 18.2 monoclonal antibody zolbetuximab to conventional chemotherapy was shown to improve the median progression-free survival (PFS) by about 2 months in claudin 18.2-positive tumors (about 30–40% of gastric cancers are claudin 18.2 positive). Thus, novel predictive biomarkers in the first-line treatment setting of gastric cancer are changing clinical practice. The SUNLIGHT study, a phase III study randomizing colorectal cancer (CRC) patients to trifluridin/tipiracil (TAS-102) with/without bevacizumab, demonstrated an improvement in overall survival from 7.5 to 10.8 months, thus, establishing a new standard of care in the third-line CRC setting. Dostarlimab, a PD‑1 inhibitor, demonstrated in a single-arm phase II trial (NCT04165772) a 100% complete (clinical) remission rate upon 6 months of treatment, establishing MSI testing in localized rectal cancer as a novel predictive biomarker for potentially organ-sparing treatment. …