Dr Turk on the Biggest Takeaways in GI Cancer from ASCO 2025

Anita Turk, MD, medical oncologist at IU Health, discusses her biggest takeaways in the realm of gastrointestinal malignancies from the 2025 ASCO Annual Meeting.

"Honestly, the advancement of immunotherapy in colorectal cancer was a highlight of this year's meeting," Turk notes. She highlights the ATOMIC clinical trial (NCT02912559), the first prospective study to look at adjuvant immunotherapy in combination with chemotherapy for patients who have MSI-high, stage III colon cancer, which "finally gave us data to use our better drugs in the adjuvant setting, showing improved outcomes in that patient population and higher chances of cure."

Turk also notes that there were updated findings from CheckMate 8HW (NCT04008030) that demonstrated significant improvements in outcomes in patients receiving first-line nivolumab (Opdivo) and ipilimumab (Yervoy) for MSI-high colorectal cancer compared with chemotherapy. This benefit even persisted beyond the first-line setting and into the second-line setting, again demonstrating the importance of using better therapeutics in earlier-line settings.

In a similar vein, updates from the BREAKWATER clinical trial (NCT04607421) included progression-free survival, which showed significant improvement in outcomes in patients who had BRAF V600E metastatic colorectal cancer. The experimental arm included FOLFOX in combination with targeted therapy (encorafenib [Braftovi] and cetuximab [Erbitux]) vs FOLFOX alone, continuing the trend of using better therapeutics in the earlier lines leading to better outcomes.