New Advances in Multidisciplinary (MDT) Treatment of Gastric Cancer

  Gastric cancer is a common malignant tumor of the digestive tract in China, and most patients with gastric cancer are already in the progressive stage or even in the advanced stage when they are detected, and the proportion of patients who can obtain radical resection is small. In recent years, the treatment mode of gastric cancer has changed from single surgery to the new treatment mode of perioperative multidisciplinary teamwork (MDT), which is a treatment mode that can independently provide diagnosis and treatment advice for a specific patient, and in which experts from different specialties discuss the direction of the patient’s diagnosis and treatment at a specific time, bringing together experts with different professional knowledge, skills and experience to provide patients with high-quality diagnosis and treatment advice. It is a treatment model that brings together specialists with various professional knowledge, skills and experience to provide patients with high quality diagnostic and therapeutic advice and recommendations. Its basic composition includes physicians in medical oncology, surgery, radiotherapy, endoscopy, pathology, imaging, and biotherapy, basic oncology researchers, and social workers. It is even suggested that more participants such as psychologists and speech therapists are needed to apply various treatments to tumors in a planned and rational manner according to the physical and mental conditions of patients, specific sites of tumors, pathological types, clinical stages and developmental tendencies, combined with changes in cellular molecular biology.  I. Surgical treatment: D2 is the currently accepted standard surgical method, D0 surgery is not recommended, at least 15 lymph nodes should be removed for examination, and the lymph node substation should be well distinguished by the surgeon for sending for examination. Minimally invasive surgeries for gastric cancer include: endoscopic treatment (EMR, ESD), laparoscopic treatment, dual-scope combination, 3D laparoscopy, and da Vinci surgery.  The key to endoscopic surgery is to improve the accuracy of preoperative staging and to avoid underestimating the depth of infiltration of the lesion or lymph node metastasis. The indications for laparoscopic surgery in Japan are: stage Ia and Ib gastric cancer, and laparoscopic D2 lymph node dissection for stage II and III gastric cancer is technically fully feasible, but still lacks support from large sample randomized controlled studies.  Second, radiotherapy, postoperative treatment plan is decided according to the postoperative pTNM stage: (1) T1aM0, R1 resected: treated according to (4).  (2) T1a/1b N0M0, R0 resected: clinical observation and follow-up. To deal with the possible presence of micrometastases in negative lymph nodes (currently undetectable by conventional pathological testing), prophylactic application of S-1 (available in domestic tegeo formulation) or capecitabine alone orally may also be considered to improve the cure rate. R1 resected patients should be treated as in (4).  (3) T2N0M0, R0 resected patients: clinical observation or some patients given chemoradiotherapy, S-1 or capecitabine single agent oral can be considered. R1 resected patients are treated according to (4).  (4) T3/4, or any T, but N1-3M0, R0-2 resected: fluorouracil-based (5-Fu or capecitabine) chemotherapy, or concurrent + radiotherapy, consider a multi-drug combination chemotherapy regimen with better efficacy: XELOX, ECF, XP, SO, SP, etc.  (5) If postoperative pathological testing reveals specific targets for drug therapy at the molecular level of cancer cells, postoperative adjuvant chemoradiotherapy + drug-targeted therapy can be considered for T2 and above.  (6) If preoperative chemoradiotherapy or + drug-targeted therapy is confirmed to be more effective by preoperative imaging or postoperative pathological testing, the regimen should be continued postoperatively, otherwise, the regimen should be changed.  (7) Whether postoperative radiotherapy in R0 resected D2 cleared patients may increase the benefit in terms of survival needs to be studied in a larger national population.  Some studies have reported that preoperative adjuvant chemotherapy or adjuvant radiotherapy facilitates surgical resection. The advantages are that it can reduce the size of the tumor and at the same time can reduce the adhesion between the tumor and the surrounding tissues; it can make the free cancer cells be killed, so that their biological activity is inhibited and not easy to grow and reproduce, which can effectively improve the surgical resection rate and has the possibility of improving the survival rate of patients.  Targeted therapy: Herceptin is the first biological agent proven to significantly improve the survival rate of patients with advanced gastric cancer. For patients with HER2-positive advanced gastric cancer, Herceptin combined with chemotherapy is an effective treatment option. Individualized and multidisciplinary treatment based on molecular typing is the future development direction.