Biomarker Testing and Targeted Treatments for Gastroesophageal Cancers

Nataliya Uboha, MD, PhD, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, discusses the talk she gave at the 2023 Great Debates & Updates on Gastrointestinal Malignancies meeting in Chicago, IL. Dr Uboha covered the use of biomarkers in the management of patients with gastroesophageal cancer, mentioning both current and upcoming agents in this space.

Transcript:

My name is Natalia Uboha. I am an associate professor at University of Wisconsin. I'm a medical oncologist and I specialize in treating patients with GI cancers. It's a pleasure to be here at the 2023 Great Debates and Updates in Gastrointestinal Malignancies meeting in Chicago.

I gave a talk today about recent updates in the treatment of patients with gastroesophageal cancers, and I specifically focused on how to best select the right treatment for the right patients. We spent a significant amount of time talking about recent updates in biomarker testing and biomarker-based studies. We talked about some of the upcoming biomarkers.

The recent highlight from the meetings in GI cancers was the SPOTLIGHT study which looked at the activity of zolbetuximab, which is an anti-claudin-18.2 antibody in gastroesophageal adenocarcinomas, and it was a positive study. We now have an emerging and new biomarker in this disease, and hopefully, zolbetuximab will become one of the tools we can use to treat patients with advanced gastroesophageal adenocarcinoma.

We also talked a bit about FGFR2 as an emerging biomarker and some of the studies that we've seen with bemarituzumab, which is an anti-FGFR2B antibody. Again, hopefully this will be yet another biomarker that we will utilize to select treatments for patients with gastroesophageal adenocarcinoma.

Ultimately, what I've highlighted is some of their recent advances changed the standard of practice and also where the field is heading, which is more specialized treatments for our patients based on the biomarker selection. These changes hopefully, will result in improved outcomes for our patients with less toxicity from treatments that don't work.

Source:

Uboha N. “Integrating Biomarkers into the Management of Gastric Cancer: A Focus on Molecular Testing and Targeted Treatment Strategies.” Presented at: Great Debates and Updates in Gastrointestinal Malignancies; March 30-April 1, 2023; Chicago; Illinois.