Concurrent Chemoradiotherapy for Stage IVB Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma（EC-CRT-003）

Summary

Retrospective studies suggested that the addition of thoracic concurrent chemoradiotherapy to systemic chemotherapy improved the survival and quality of life (QOL) of patients with metastatic esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). However, no prospective study had been conducted to confirm these findings. Recently, immunotherapy targeting the PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoints combined with chemotherapy had been proved to significantly prolong the survival of those patients compared with chemotherapy alone. Moreover, anti-PD-1 combined with radiotherapy exerts a synergistic anti-tumor effect, which may further improve the combination efficacy. This randomized, phase II study aimed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of the chemotherapy and anti-PD-1 combined with concurrent chemoradiotherapy to primary tumor versus systemic therapy alone in stage IVB ESCC. Of note, non-regional lymph node metastasis only was the stratification factor in the random assignment.

Timeline

Start

2022-09-20

Primary completion

2024-08-30

Completion

2025-09-30

Publications

• Background Guttmann DM, Mitra N, Bekelman J, Metz JM, Plastaras J, Feng W, Swisher-McClure S. Improved Overall Survival with Aggressive Primary Tumor Radiotherapy for Patients with Metastatic Esophageal Cancer. J Thorac Oncol. 2017 Jul;12(7):1131-1142. doi: 10.1016/j.jtho.2017.03.026. Epub 2017 Apr 28.
• Background Liu S, Luo L, Zhao L, Zhu Y, Liu H, Li Q, Cai L, Hu Y, Qiu B, Zhang L, Shen J, Yang Y, Liu M, Xi M. Induction chemotherapy followed by definitive chemoradiotherapy versus chemoradiotherapy alone in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma: a randomized phase II trial. Nat Commun. 2021 Jun 29;12(1):4014. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-24288-1.

Drugs

Indications