Background: Conversion therapy is an option for unresectable metastatic gastric cancer when distant metastases are controlled by chemotherapy; however, the feasibility and efficacy remain unclear. This study aimed to assess the feasibility and efficacy of conversion therapy in patients with initially unresectable gastric cancer treated with docetaxel, cisplatin, and S-1 (DCS) chemotherapy by evaluating clinical outcomes.
Methods: One hundred unresectable metastatic gastric cancer patients, enrolled in three DCS chemotherapy clinical trials, were retrospectively evaluated. The patients received oral S-1 (40 mg/m2 b.i.d.) on days 1-14 and intravenous cisplatin (60 mg/m2) and docetaxel (50-60 mg/m2) on day 8 every 3 weeks. Conversion therapy was defined when the patients could undergo R0 resection post-DCS chemotherapy and were able to tolerate curative surgery.
Results: Conversion therapy was achieved in 33/100 patients, with no perioperative mortality. Twenty-eight of the 33 patients (84.8 %) achieved R0 resection, and 78.8 % were defined as histological chemotherapeutic responders. The median overall survival (OS) of patients who underwent conversion therapy was 47.8 months (95 % CI 28.0-88.5 months). Patients who underwent R0 resection had significantly longer OS than those who underwent R1 and R2 resections (P = 0.0002). Of the patients with primarily unresectable metastases, 10 % lived >5 years. Among patients who underwent conversion therapy, multivariate analysis showed that the pathological response was a significant independent predictor for OS.
Conclusions: DCS safely induced a high conversion rate, with very high R0 and pathological response rates, and was associated with a good prognosis; these findings warrant further prospective investigations.
Keywords: Conversion therapy; DCS; Gastric cancer.