New Developments in Treating RAS-Mutated Metastatic Colorectal Cancer

Opinion statementOne of the great challenges in digestive oncology is choosing the optimal therapy forRAS-mutated metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC). Even though theRAS genes and accompanying pathway were identified decades ago and extensive knowledge exists on their role in carcinogenesis, it has proven challenging to translate these insights into new therapies and clinical benefit for patients. However, recently, new drugs targeting this pathway (for example,KRASG12C inhibitors) have shown promising results in clinical trials, as monotherapy or in combination regimens. Although resistance remains an important issue, more knowledge on adaptive resistance and feedback loops in the RAS-pathway has led to strategical combination regimens to overcome this problem. In the past year, many encouraging results have been published or presented at conferences. Even though some of the data is still preliminary, these studies may bring practice-changing results and can lead to a clinical benefit for patients over the coming years. Because of these recent developments, the treatment ofRAS-mutated mCRC has become a topic of great interest. Therefore, in this review, we will summarize the standard of care and discuss the most important emerging therapies for this patient population.
Source: Current Treatment Options in Oncology - Category: Cancer & Oncology Source Type: research