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Molecular Classification of Colon Cancer: Perspectives for Personalized Adjuvant Therapy

  • Adjuvant Therapy for Colon Cancers (AB Benson III and A de Gramont, Section Editors)
  • Published:
Current Colorectal Cancer Reports

Abstract

Although surgery for early-stage colorectal cancer (CRC) is often curative, many patients require adjuvant chemotherapy to treat micrometastatic disease and to reduce the risk of recurrence. Targeted therapies have improved outcomes for patients with metastatic disease but, in the adjuvant setting, options are limited to a fluoropyrimidine alone or in combination with oxaliplatin. There is an unmet need for new predictive biomarkers to personalise treatment in the adjuvant setting. With goals to address this gap and to better characterise disease heterogeneity, several groups including our own have identified three to six gene expression subtypes that were later consolidated into consensus molecular subtypes as part of the Colorectal Cancer Subtyping Consortium (CRCSC) effort. In this review, we discuss the differences and similarities between these subtypes and their potential prognostic and predictive values. We question whether a personalised treatment approach based on CRC subtypes might be beneficial in the adjuvant setting to improve treatment options and ultimately patient outcomes.

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Acknowledgment

We thank Dr Kate Young for critically reading the manuscript. We acknowledge NHS funding to the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at The Royal Marsden and the ICR.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Royal Marsden Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK

    Elisa Fontana

  2. Department of Oncology, University Hospital of Vaud (CHUV), Lausanne, Switzerland

    Krisztian Homicsko

  3. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

    Krisztian Homicsko

  4. Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), Lausanne, Switzerland

    Krisztian Homicsko

  5. Division of Molecular Pathology, Institute of Cancer Research, 15 Cotswold Road, Sutton, London, SM2 5NG, UK

    Katherine Eason & Anguraj Sadanandam

Authors
  1. Elisa Fontana
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  2. Krisztian Homicsko
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  3. Katherine Eason
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  4. Anguraj Sadanandam
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anguraj Sadanandam.

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Conflict of Interest

Elisa Fontana declares that she has no conflict of interest.

Krisztian Homicsko declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Katherine Eason declares that she has no conflict of interest.

Anguraj Sadanandam has received financial support through a grant from Bristol-Myers Squibb via the International Immuno-Oncology Network and holds a patent on colorectal cancer classification with different prognosis and personalized therapeutic responses (application number PCT/IB2013/060416) with royalties paid.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Adjuvant Therapy for Colon Cancers

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Fontana, E., Homicsko, K., Eason, K. et al. Molecular Classification of Colon Cancer: Perspectives for Personalized Adjuvant Therapy. Curr Colorectal Cancer Rep 12, 296–302 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11888-016-0341-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11888-016-0341-6

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