Immunotherapy in the neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy for locally advanced rectal cancer / 中华放射肿瘤学杂志

ABSTRACT

Long-course concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT) or short-course radiotherapy (SCRT) prior to surgery and postoperative chemotherapy is one of the main standard therapies for patients with locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC). On this basis, total neoadjuvant therapy (TNT) has been shown to improve disease-free survival, distant metastasis-free survival and complete response rates, whereas the 3-year distant recurrence rate is still above 20% and pathological complete response (pCR) is less than 30%. Long-term survival and adverse reactions remain to be improved. Currently, significant achivement has been obtained in immunotherapy. Application of immunotherapy in the treatment of rectal cancer remains to be urgently validated. In recent years, immunotherapy combined with preoperative chemoradiotherapy has been adopted for LARC in clinical trials. Besides, immunotherapy alone, especially programmed death-1 (PD-1) / programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) inhibitor, has also been utilized to treat colon rectal cancer. Relevant research progress was reviewed in this article.