Neoadjuvant Therapy for Locally-Advanced Rectal Cancer
A special issue of Cancers (ISSN 2072-6694). This special issue belongs to the section "Cancer Therapy".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 April 2024 | Viewed by 1113
Special Issue Editors
Interests: rectal cancer; colon cancer; gastrointestinal tumors
Interests: colon cancer; rectal cancer; angiogenesis; biomarker; precision medicine
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Locally advanced rectal cancers (LARC) are the subject of a rapidly evolving treatment paradigm. For many years, the standard therapy has been concurrent chemo-radiotherapy or short-course radiotherapy alone, followed by surgery and adjuvant post-operative chemotherapy. An alternative strategy, known as total neoadjuvant therapy (TNT), incorporates chemotherapy before (induction) or after (consolidation) neoadjuvant radiotherapy prior to surgery. Recent data from two randomized controlled trials have shown that TNT improves treatment compliance and disease-free survival (DFS) and reduces the risk of distant metastases. TNT also results in higher rates of clinical complete response, favoring organ preservation, and potentially represents a platform for modulated and tailored treatment strategies.
However, significant challenges remain to be overcome. For clinical utility, there is a great need to define the optimal duration of TNT, optimal chemotherapy, and radiotherapy regimens, and particularly factors allowing patients’ selection. Despite the widespread enthusiasm for this strategy, TNT is indeed unlikely to represent the optimal treatment modality for every LARC patient. Clinical factors along with imaging-based, blood-based, tissue-based, and molecular biomarkers are being investigated that can assist clinicians before and during TNT to assess treatment efficacy. The introduction of immunotherapy and tailored therapies in LARC treatment program is also under active development.
Dr. Carlo Aschele
Dr. Francesca Negri
Dr. Silvia Marchetti
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- rectal cancer
- total neoadjuvant therapy
- induction chemotherapy
- consolidation chemotherapy
- organ preservation
- immunotherapy
- prognostic biomarkers
- predictive biomarkers
