ASCO update: gastric cancer

Treatment of gastric cancer has improved substantially during the past decade. The aim of this short review is to highlight abstracts from this year’s ASCO Annual Meeting and the ASCO GI Meeting. The CRITICS trial showed no significant difference in overall survival by the addition of postoperative radiochemotherapy in the curative setting. In the palliative setting, targeting claudin could be a very promising novel treatment approach as shown by the first results of the phase II FAST trial. Many small trials show interesting results of immune checkpoint inhibitors in gastric cancer. Predictive biomarkers, however, still remain unclear. In second-line treatment of HER2-positive patients, no improvement could be shown by the use of trastuzumab emtansine in the GATSBY phase III trial.