MSK gastrointestinal medical oncologist Dr. Michael Foote shares new research from a small phase 2 clinical trial that found half of rectal patients with high HER2 saw their tumors disappear with targeted therapies and chemotherapy, meaning they didn’t need surgery or in most cases even radiation.
DR. MICHAEL FOOTE
My name is Mike Foote and I'm a medical oncologist at MSK with a specialty in rectal and colon cancer treatment. Patients with rectal cancer often require chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery to treat their tumor. However, the surgery can have a lot of side effects, often leaving patients with a permanent ostomy bag.
We at MSK have been trying to imagine ways that we can combine additional medicines alongside chemotherapy to shrink the tumors more and hopefully avoid the need for surgery.
We evaluated patients that have an increased amount of a growth protein called HER2 on top of their rectal tumor with special targeted treatments against this HER2 protein in combination with chemotherapy.
Amazingly, we saw that many of the patients had significant dramatic responses with shrinkage of their rectal tumors, and many of the patients on the research trial didn't need surgery, which was very exciting.
In a bigger sense, this also gave us confidence that adding additional targeted therapies for early stage rectal cancer might pay off. Our next steps for the study are to enroll more patients and learn more about how this treatment works, as well as provide this treatment for patients outside of a clinical trial.