C. Jillian Tsai, MD, PhD, Discussed the Rationale for Using Consolidation Radiotherapy in Oligoprogressive Metastatic Disease

At the 2021 American Society for Radiation Oncology, CancerNetwork® spoke with C. Jillian Tsai, MD, PhD,a radiationoncologist from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, about the rationale for examining the use of consolidation radiotherapy in patients with breast and lung cancer who have experience oligo progression. Additionally, Tsai also explained how oligoprogression can affect the treatment course for those with metastatic disease and questioned whether the addition of radiation to systemic therapy may aid in extending progression-free survival.

Transcript:

We know that there is a spectrum of metastatic disease, ranging from just a few metastases that are stable to multiple metastases with a very mixed response to systemic therapy. In many patients that initially started with systemic therapy, they usually work for a while, but over time, a few cells or a few tumor sites are not responding anymore, but other sites continue to be stable. This is the situation where we call mixed response or oligoprogression. There’s really no standard of care after running out of first or second- or third-line systemic therapy. In this situation, we were curious to see if we used radiation therapy to target specifically progressive lesions, whether the radiation could help in prolonging the progression-free survival, while the patients can still be on the systemic therapy.

Reference

Tsai J, Yang T, Guttmann DM, et al. Consolidative use of radiotherapy to block (CURB) oligoprogression: interim analysis of the first randomized study of stereotactic body radiotherapy in patients with oligoprogressive metastatic cancer of the lung and breast. Presented at the 2021 American Society for Radiation Oncology; October 24-27 2021; Chicago IL. Abstract LBA-3.