The Role of Circulating Tumor DNA in Colorectal Cancer

At the 2023 Great Debates & Updates in Gastrointestinal Malignancies meeting in New York, New York, Aparna Parikh, MD, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Boston, Massachusetts, presented on the role circulating tumor DNA may have in the treatment of patients with colorectal cancer.

Transcript:

Hi, I am Aparna Parikh. I'm a GI oncologist at the MGH Cancer Center, and I'm here at Great Debates & Updates in Gastrointestinal Malignancies 2023 and excited to be with you all today.

My talk today was entitled “ctDNA and Gastrointestinal Cancers,” and I focused on the role of ctDNA in colorectal cancer, which is a hot, hot topic these days and certainly a biomarker that is quickly come into the limelight. We are seeing much more data to support how ctDNA may be used into clinical practice.

What I talked about is first of all, what ctDNA is. Then we went on to review some of the data in terms of the prognostic value of ctDNA in colorectal cancer specifically, to help us try to understand the patients who are at really high risk for recurrence and that are low risk for recurrence. We spent some time talking about different data sets, and now there's a plethora of data out there that has shown that ctDNA is a powerful prognostic biomarker. But in terms of just being a prognostic biomarker, that's a hard tool to actually enact in clinical practice.

We spent the final part of my talk today talking about how ctDNA may be used to become a predictive biomarker, to figure out which patients may actually benefit or not benefit from chemotherapy. And if we use this test, can we actually improve how long people live? That's the goal of what we're trying to do, is we're trying to reduce recurrences, but also spare people from chemotherapy if they don't need chemotherapy. Lots of emerging data to suggest the prognostic role, but less data in terms of actually showing that it is predictive. We spent some time talking of a couple of studies that are starting to show some signals that ctDNA may be predictive in terms of just standard of care chemotherapy. But whether or not we can use it to escalate or deescalate care still is yet to be determined. There are many clinical trials around the globe that are looking at this very question.

We're still in the early days of ctDNA, lots of buzz around it, and I expect it many years to come at Great Debates & Updates meetings. We're going to see more and more data that actually contributes to our learning and knowledge of not only how we can use this test to guide prognosis, but actually how we can use this test to determine patient's care.

Source:

Parikh A. Circulating Tumor DNA (ctDNA) in Gastrointestinal Malignancies. Presented at Great Debates & Updates in Gastrointestinal Malignancies; September 28-30; New York, NY.