Kohei Shitara, MD, National Cancer Center Hospital East, Chiba, Japan, discusses future directions of research following the CheckMate-649 trial (NCT02872116), which demonstrated that patients with gastric, gastro-oesophageal junction and oesophageal adenocarcinoma cancer had a greater overall survival (OS) when treated with first-line nivolumab plus chemotherapy compared to chemotherapy alone. Dr Shitara emphasises that more comprehensive efficacy analyses should reveal other potential biomarkers, besides tumor mutational burden (TMB), that can indicate which patients respond best to nivolumab plus chemotherapy. Further research is being conducted which uses the gene expression signature (GES) to identify potential pathways that therapies can target, and complementary therapies are being developed to alter tumor microenvironments (TME). This interview was recorded at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2022 in New Orleans, LA.
