Targeted therapy for advanced gastric cancer

Gastric cancer is the fourth most common malignant tumor in the world and the second most common in terms of mortality. my country is a high-incidence area for gastric cancer, with about 400,000 new cases each year. This disease is very harmful, so if you have this disease, you must go to a regular hospital for treatment in time. Here we will introduce the content about targeted treatment of advanced gastric cancer.

Surgery is the only radical treatment for gastric cancer, but gastric cancer is highly hidden in the early stages. About 70% of patients are diagnosed in the middle or late stages, making it difficult to completely cure the disease through surgery. The treatment of advanced gastric cancer is mainly systemic chemotherapy, which uses chemotherapy drugs to kill tumor cells in order to prolong the patient's survival time, relieve symptoms and improve the quality of life. When patients receive chemotherapy, they often experience mild or severe adverse reactions. This is because while the drugs kill cancer cells and control the growth and reproduction of cancer cells, they inevitably damage normal cells. Therefore, patients sometimes experience nausea, vomiting, low white blood cells, hair loss and other reactions.

With the development of medical science, we have realized that the occurrence and development of tumors are related to the changes in many of our own genes and abnormal signal transduction pathways. The so-called targeted therapy is aimed at certain unique signal transduction pathways in the pathogenesis of tumors or monoclonal antibodies and small molecules used in a certain pathogenesis to interrupt it, so as to achieve the purpose of treating tumors. Compared with traditional chemotherapy, targeted therapy has its own advantages. First, targeted drugs are more targeted, only targeting cancer cells, and have a definite effect. Secondly, targeted drugs have mild side effects, will not damage normal cell tissues, lack the common side effects of chemotherapy, will not cause patients to lose hair, and will not cause patients to feel nausea and vomiting.

In the field of gastric cancer treatment, targeted therapeutic drugs represented by trastuzumab have opened a new era of targeted treatment for gastric cancer. Studies have found that about one-fifth of gastric cancer patients have high expression of HER2. The landmark global multicenter clinical trial TOGA study in 2009 confirmed for the first time that trastuzumab combined with chemotherapy can prolong the overall survival of patients with advanced gastric cancer, while significantly reducing the risk of death and improving the quality of life of patients. Trastuzumab combined with chemotherapy has become the first choice for patients with HER2 overexpression of gastric cancer. At the same time, trastuzumab combined with chemotherapy has become an important new individualized medical method, providing a new and effective treatment method for clinical treatment, and bringing gastric cancer into the era of targeted treatment. At present, Shanxi Cancer Hospital has carried out HER2 status testing for patients with advanced gastric cancer. For patients with HER2 overexpression, trastuzumab is recommended to be used at the same time as chemotherapy. The treatment has shown good results without serious adverse reactions.

It is worth mentioning that apatinib, a small molecule targeted drug for advanced gastric cancer developed and produced independently by my country, will soon be launched on the market. The drug has dual effects of anti-tumor angiogenesis and anti-tumor cell proliferation. This will surely add another powerful weapon to the treatment of advanced gastric cancer.