Deborah Mukherji, MD, Talks Gaps in Research and Potential for Further Study on HCC, Biliary Tract Cancers

Dr Mukherji, American University of Beirut, Lebanon, summarizes 3 posters on gallbladder cancer, cholangiocarcinoma, and hepatocellular carcinoma that were presented at the 2020 virtual ESMO World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer, which identify gaps in research and can inform future trials of biliary tract cancer.

Transcript

My name is Dr. Deborah Mukherji. I'm a medical oncologist from the American University of Beirut. It's my great pleasure to be participating in this virtual ESMO World GI meeting this year.

I hope that even though we can't meet in person, we'll be opening up the forum to many oncologists, surgeons, radiologists, pathologists all around the world who may not have been able to access the meeting in a face-to-face format. It really is my pleasure to be participating in this virtual format this year.

I will be giving the Poster Discussion Session for the hepatobiliary posters. There are three posters that we'll be discussing. The first is by Dr. Azizi and colleagues, a systematic review and meta-analysis of chemotherapy for advanced gallbladder cancer.

This is a really very important review and meta-analysis bringing together all of the data that we have about the efficacy of systemic chemotherapy in advanced gallbladder cancer.

Whereas we have very few data to go on, bringing everything together really gives us a baseline to design newer studies, hopefully with more molecular stratification, which is where we are going with treatment of advanced biliary tract cancer.

The second abstract is looking at the role of pretreatment FDG PET scans in cholangiocarcinoma. This single-center series actually did not find a correlation with overall survival and SUVmax.

However, this is something which is an evolving field and in a similar vein, really shows us how imaging plus molecular pathology will be key to help us to stratify the best treatments for our patients with biliary tract cancer in the future.

The third abstract is looking at a single-center institution analysis of hepatocellular carcinoma in patients who've also been diagnosed with HIV. This, which is in line with other data, has shown a decreased survival in patients with a co-diagnosis of HIV and hepatocellular carcinoma.

It really calls for more research, particularly in the field of immuno-oncology, specifically in patients who have a diagnosis of HIV. This is something which is being looked at in ongoing studies because, unfortunately, many patients with HIV are excluded from immunotherapy trials.

Again, all these three abstracts have identified important gaps in our data, gaps in our knowledge that need to be addressed with perspective studies.