NCCN Guidelines Updates: Management of Metastatic Colorectal Cancer

In the last year, several impactful updates have been added to the NCCN Guidelines for Colorectal Cancer (CRC) for the management of metastatic disease, including additional options for BRAF-mutated advanced CRC and the inclusion of combination immunotherapy (PD-1 and CTLA-4) for deficient mismatch repair/microsatellite instability (MSI)-high advanced CRC. According to Dr. Wells A. Messersmith, targeted therapies (ie, VEGFR, EGFR, multitargeted tyrosine kinase inhibitors) play an important role in CRC management, but none of them have been successful in the adjuvant setting (although checkpoint inhibition is now being tested in MSI-high stage III CRC). Reliable predictive biomarkers for most agents are still greatly lacking, highlighting the importance of investing in CRC biomarker studies.