Maria Svensson, MD, PhD Candidate, of Lund University, discusses high expression of PD-1 and PD-L1 in chemotherapy-naive esophageal and gastric adenocarcinomas, the implications for survival, and the link to a deficiency in mismatched repair genes (Abstract 9).
Steven D. Leach, MD, of Dartmouth University’s Norris Cotton Cancer Center, discusses the personalized approach that GI cancers will require to make rational use of immunotherapy—including a subset of pancreatic cancers, which appear to be highly immunogenic and are associated with long-term survival.
Pieter van der Sluis, MD, PhD, of the University Medical Center Utrecht, discusses study findings that compared robot-assisted minimally invasive thoracolaparoscopic esophagectomy vs open transthoracic esophagectomy for resectable esophageal cancer (Abstract 6).
Basem Azab, MD, of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami, discusses the impact on overall survival when more than 2 months elapse between finishing neoadjuvant therapy and undergoing esophagectomy (Abstract 2).
David H. Ilson, MD, PhD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the merits of preoperative chemotherapy vs chemoradiotherapy, the role of targeted agents, recent results from genomic profiling, and whether PET scans can guide neoadjuvant treatment.
Florian Lordick, MD, of the University Medicine Leipzig, discusses study findings on intraperitoneal immunotherapy with the antibody catumaxomab for patients with peritoneal carcinomatosis from gastric cancer (Abstract 4).
