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Al B. Benson III, MD, FACP, FASCO
Al B. Benson III, MD, FACP, FASCO
Posted: Wednesday, June 21, 2023
After resection of gallbladder cancer, both the use of combination therapy with gemcitabine plus cisplatin and capecitabine with chemoradiation therapy improved patients’ disease-free survival, according to the findings of the phase II GECCOR-GB trial, which were presented at the 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting (Abstract 4017). These results support the use of either treatment regimen as the standard of care while additional investigative efforts continue to evaluate their efficacy in larger phase III studies, suggested Anant Ramaswamy, MD, of Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, India, and colleagues.
From 2019 to 2022, 90 patients with gallbladder adenocarcinoma were recruited for the study. All patients underwent R0 or R1 resection within 3 months before recruitment. Patients were randomly assigned to receive combination therapy with 1,000 mg/m2 of gemcitabine and 25 mg/m2 of cisplatin (n = 45, gemcitabine-plus-cisplatin group) or 1,000 mg/m2 of capecitabine followed by chemoradiation and additional capecitabine (n = 45, capecitabine-radiotherapy group).
The study authors reported 1-year disease-free survival rates of 88.9% and 77.8% with gemcitabine plus cisplatin and capecitabine-radiotherapy, respectively. The 1-year overall survival rate was 95.6% for patients in the gemcitabine-plus-cisplatin group and 88.9% for patients in the capecitabine-radiotherapy group. Furthermore, 26.6% of patients in each treatment group had evidence of distant metastases, and 6.6% of patients given gemcitabine plus cisplatin had evidence of locoregional metastases.
In addition, 13.3% of patients in the gemcitabine-plus-cisplatin group experienced grade 3 or 4 treatment-related neutropenia. A total of 31.1% of patients who received capecitabine-radiotherapy experienced grade 2 or 3 treatment-related hand-foot syndrome.
Disclosure: Dr. Ramaswamy reported no conflicts of interest. For full disclosures of the other study authors, visit coi.asco.org.
