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Cancer therapy

From neoadjuvant to organ-sparing immunotherapy for colorectal cancer

In a new study, neoadjuvant immunotherapy led to major pathological responses in patients with locally advanced colon cancer harboring mismatch repair deficiency — and emerging evidence suggests that organ-sparing approaches may also be feasible.

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Fig. 1: An organ-sparing, tumor-immunoablation strategy for MMRd cancers.

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Correspondence to Luis A. Diaz Jr..

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Competing interests

B.R. served in a consulting and/or advisory role for Neophor, and has received travel, accommodation and expenses from Bayer, Servier and Astellas outside of the current manuscript. A.C. served in a consulting and/or advisory role for Abbvie, Amgen, Pfizer/Seagen, Merck, GSK, Regeneron, Daiichi Sanko, Janssen and Illumina, and receives institutional research funding from GSK and Pfizer/Seagen. L.A.D. is a member of the board of directors of Quest Diagnostics and Epitope, is a compensated consultant to Innovatus, Seer, Delfi and Neophore and is an inventor of multiple licensed patents related to technology for circulating tumor DNA analyses and MMRd for diagnosis and therapy; some of these licenses and relationships are associated with equity or royalty payments to the inventors. L.A.D. also holds equity in Quest Diagnostics, Epitope, Seer, Delfi and Neophore, divested equity in Personal Genome Diagnostics to LabCorp in February 2022 and divested equity in Thrive Earlier Detection to Exact Biosciences in January 2021; his spouse holds equity in Amgen. The terms of all these arrangements are being managed by Memorial Sloan Kettering in accordance with their conflict-of-interest policy.

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Rousseau, B., Cercek, A. & Diaz, L.A. From neoadjuvant to organ-sparing immunotherapy for colorectal cancer. Nat Med 30, 2407–2408 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03182-5

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