Clinical Potential of Biological Response Modifiers Combined with Chemotherapy for Gastric Cancer

The most effective treatment for gastric cancer is complete surgical resection with lymphadenectomy. However, a number of patients experience recurrence of the cancer even after curative surgery. This review focuses on comparative trials studying the use of adjuvant therapy with chemotherapy plus im...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inDigestive surgery Vol. 19; no. 4; pp. 255 - 260
Main Authors Shibata, Masahiko, Nezu, Takeshi, Fujisaki, Shigeru, Andou, Katsuyuki, Tomita, Ryouichi, Fukuzawa, Masahiro
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel, Switzerland 2002
Subjects
Review
Cancer immunology
Immune suppression
Chemotherapy
Biological response modifiers
Chemoimmunotherapy
Gastric cancer
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:The most effective treatment for gastric cancer is complete surgical resection with lymphadenectomy. However, a number of patients experience recurrence of the cancer even after curative surgery. This review focuses on comparative trials studying the use of adjuvant therapy with chemotherapy plus immunotherapy in the treatment of patients with curatively resected gastric cancer. Preoperative and intraperitoneal therapy, and therapy for advanced or recurrent gastric cancer are also discussed. At present, some subset analyses of adjuvant trials have shown favorable results suggesting that the biological response modifiers (BRMs), PSK or OK-432, add a benefit to chemotherapy. For advanced gastric cancer, although gastric cancer cells are generally not very sensitive to most of the currently available chemotherapeutic agents, it has been reported that biochemical modulation with treatments including low-dose cisplatin + 5-FU (fluorouracil) have high response rates and exert an immunomodulatory effect especially when used in combination with BRMs. The impact of splenectomy and some of the promising newly developed drugs are discussed.
ISSN:0253-4886
1421-9883
DOI:10.1159/000064577