Cornelis van de Velde, MD, PhD, of Leiden University Medical Center, discusses the International Watch & Wait database, established to track evidence on organ-preserving strategies in patients with rectal cancer (Abstract 521).
Julien Edeline, MD, of the Centre Eugène Marquis, discusses study findings on gemcitabine and oxaliplatin vs surveillance following surgery for localized biliary tract cancer (Abstract 225).
Salah-Eddin Al-Batran, MD, of the Institute of Clinical Cancer Research and Nordwest Hospital, discusses study findings on paclitaxel with and without RAD001 in patients with gastric cancer whose disease has progressed after therapy with a fluoropyrimidine/platinum-containing regimen (Abstract 4).
Scott Kopetz, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses study findings on irinotecan and cetuximab with or without vemurafenib in BRAF-mutant metastatic colorectal cancer (Abstract 520).
Cynthia L. Sears, MD, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, summarizes her keynote talk on microbes, microbiota, and colon cancer. Next-generation sequencing combined with biologic studies suggests that most colorectal cancer cases have specific microbiome associations.
Geoffrey Ku, MD, MBA, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the promise of immunotherapy drugs and the search for biomarkers that will help identify patients more likely to respond, not only to these medications, but to combinations of immunotherapies, other targeted treatments, chemotherapy drugs, and radiation.
