Measuring Therapeutic Response in Colon Cancer

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Given the recent advances in treatment being made for patients with colorectal cancer (CRC), it could be time to develop a new criteria to assess how a patient is responding to therapy, suggests Daniel Haller MD. Measures such as depth of response and longitudinality of response can provide practical information about whether or not to continue therapy, he adds. These approaches may explain, for instance, why the FIRE-3 study showed an improvement in overall survival without the typically prolonged progression-free survival.

It’s time to move beyond RECIST, adds John Marshall, MD. If you look at a radiology report without looking at the actual disc from a CT scan, you’ll often make the wrong clinical decision, he emphasizes. New approaches to assess responses to treatment in CRC are under development, including molecular and functional imaging techniques.