Three Trials From ASCO GI Renew Hope for Successful Treatment of Difficult GI Cancers

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

This is Mark Lewis, MD, director of gastrointestinal (GI) oncology at Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, Utah. I want to summarize some takeaway points from the 2022 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) GI Cancers Symposium.

Many oncologists will tell you that the litmus test of a successful conference is how much it affects your practice, and I believe that data were presented at this meeting that will certainly affect practice immediately and give us a sneak preview of how our treatments may change in the future.

Three studies have particularly catchy trial acronyms, but I assure you that my interest in them is not just clever wordplay. This was meaningful research.

I'll start with KRYSTAL-1 — that's "crystal" with a "K" as a hint to what we're looking at. Can we make KRAS mutations "druggable?" KRAS mutations have famously, or infamously, been considered nonactionable mutations for many, many years, especially in the field of GI oncology. But recent advances in other areas, such as thoracic oncology, have raised our interest in seeing whether particular KRAS mutations can be exploited in otherwise refractory GI cancers.

KRYSTAL-1 looked at pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and other noncolorectal GI cancers that had previously been treated and specifically harbored the