The Digestive Tumor Treatment Group (TTD) has highlighted the usefulness of the RETUD Tumor Registry, a database that draws a faithful picture of the needs, trends, and areas for improvement in the management of hepatocellular carcinoma, based on the clinical information of more than 800 patients treated in Spain.
As explained by the president of the TTD Group and head of service at Hospital Marqués de Valdecilla, Fernando Rivera, this database, the "largest" in Spain, offers oncologists real data on the response to different treatments and makes it easier to select the most appropriate therapeutic options for each patient profile.
RETUD has served as support for two investigations developed by specialists in liver tumors from the TTD, whose findings have recently been made known at the Gastrointestinal Cancers Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO-GI, by its acronym in English) and at the meeting of the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology (SEOM).
The first study, coordinated by the medical oncologist at Hospital Universitario Marqués de Valdecilla Carlos López, has confirmed the efficacy of the atezolizumab and bevacizumab combination, one of the systemic therapies most used in first line in Spain for the treatment of advanced hepatocellular carcinoma.
In this analysis of the Tumor Registry, 247 patients treated with this regimen, used in Spain for three years, were included. The data indicate a progression-free survival of 10.3 months and a survival from the start of treatment of 14 months. In addition, a relevant proportion of patients obtained disease control or an initial response to treatment.
"Despite these still being preliminary data, with limited follow-up, these results are very important because they come from real clinical practice," the person responsible for the study has noted.
The work has also made it possible to better profile the factors that may condition the benefit of this therapy. Specifically, the RETUD records showed that impaired liver function or the presence of macrovascular invasion are associated with a worse prognosis and with less favorable results, both in progression-free survival and in overall survival.
Contribution to another key study
The second analysis, led by the medical oncologist from the Hospital Universitario de Burgos Ana María López, has provided new evidence on the treatment sequence in hepatocellular carcinoma after a first line with immunotherapy and has shown that, in Spain, tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKI) are the most used option.
Likewise, this work has highlighted the need to maintain a good functional status during the course of the disease in order to be able to access successive lines of treatment that provide relevant clinical benefit.
For patients, projects such as the TTD Tumor Registry represent notable progress, since they allow individual experience to contribute to refining the care of those who will receive a diagnosis in the future. In this line, the president of the Federación Española del Hígado (FEH), Elena Arcega, has emphasized that research is "fundamental" to advance in the treatment of liver cancer and has called for the advances achieved to be distributed equitably among all those affected.
Coinciding with World Liver Cancer Day, which is celebrated this Friday, the experts of the TTD have insisted on the relevance of prevention and early diagnosis, advances in treatments, the multidisciplinary approach, research into biomarkers, and the guarantee of equitable access to therapies.
According to the Sociedad Española de Oncología Médica (SEOM), liver cancer is diagnosed each year in around 7,000 people in Spain and presents limited survival, with only two in 10 patients alive five years after diagnosis. The incorporation of new systemic therapies, together with comprehensive and multidisciplinary care, has made it possible to improve survival expectations.