Chemotherapy Treatment in Gastric Cancer

Eric Van Cutsem, MD, PhD, at University Hospitals Gasthuisberg/Leuven in Leuven, Belgium, discusses the challenges of using chemotherapy to treat patients with gastric cancer.

Clinical Pearls:

• Using trastuzumab or other anti-HER2 agents when treating patients with gastric cancer does not eliminate the need to use chemotherapy.
• Patients with gastric cancer are often in poor health to begin with and have low tolerance levels and fast occurrances of resistance after undergoing chemotherapy.
• There is room for growth and improvement in chemotherapy in order to determine if the treatments can contain less toxicities, which remains a challenge for patients in regards to their overall means of survival.