Trial Information

Prospective Observational Study of Patients With Locally Advanced Gastric Cancer Treated With Perioperative Chemotherapy and Surgery

Chile belongs to the countries with a high mortality rate due to gastric cancer, and this
disease is the most frequent cause of cancer death in Chile. Despite of adequate surgery,
survival rates are disappointing, with less than 60% of patients for all stages achieving to
be alive at 5 years. This is due to the fact that frequently gastric cancer is diagnosed at
an advanced stage. For locally advanced gastric cancer a multimodality treatment is
recommended, with the alternatives of surgery followed by chemotherapy (asian approach),
surgery followed by chemoradiation (US approach) and perioperative chemotherapy (european
approach). These three strategies are valid standard treatment options and have shown to
improve overall survival in stage IB to IVA gastric cancer.

Perioperative chemotherapy administered pre- and postoperatively, has shown to downstage the
tumor, increase curative resection, progression free and overall survival.

For patients with potentially resectable gastric cancer staged T2 or higher or cN+, NCCN
Guidelines recommend perioperative chemotherapy (category1). Chilean guidelines for gastric
cancer state the alternative of perioperative chemotherapy, however this approach has not
been used widely in public hospitals because lack of financial support.

Some gastric cancers overexpress HER2, and this subset of patients benefit from targeted
therapy at an advanced stage. The proportions of patients with these molecular
characteristics vary widely depending of the geographic area. The chilean population has
been investigated in small series, but the incidence of HER2 positive gastric cancer is not
known. We therefore plan to measure HER2 expression in all participating patients.