This week, the ZonMw project “Personalized adjuvant therapy in early colon cancer” started with a kick-off meeting. This study aims to compare new, molecular methods to select patients with early CC after curative surgery who may benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy to the current selection procedure. During this meeting, Veerle Coupé of the DMC gave an overview of the project plan. Then, more in depth presentations addressed the different goals of this project. New ideas as well as potential difficulties were discussed.

Project goal 1: Evaluation of the impact of synoptic reporting

The presentation during the meeting focused on the effects of synoptic reporting. Synoptic reporting is a documentation method that uses structured checklists. Due to synoptic reporting, pathology reports are more complete and of higher quality. This way of reporting may improve patient care. We will evaluate the impact of synoptic reporting by comparing recurrence rates in patients with and without synoptic reporting and extrapolate this data to long-term health gains in the Dutch population using a Markov model.

Project goal 2: Long-term benefits and cost-effectiveness of molecular testing

For this project goal, the decision model built in project goal 1 will be extended to include important molecular markers using data from the literature and the MATCH study. During the meeting, the aim and study design of MATCH were presented. The Prospective Nationwide Colorectal Cancer cohort (PLCRC) will provide data on quality of life and productivity in early stage colorectal cancer.

Project goal 3: Gene-expression subtyping based adjuvant treatment

In the final project goal, we aim the explore the potential long-term health benefits and cost-effectiveness of molecular based subtyping to make adjuvant treatment decisions. The decision model that will be built to address this research question will obtain input from the KWF/Alpe d’HuZes project CONNECTION, in which the value of gene-expression subtyping to inform adjuvant treatment decisions is assessed.

It was an interesting meeting and the team is looking forward to the collaboration.