What is this summary about?This summary describes an article about a study called FRESCO-2. The goal of FRESCO-2 was to investigate whether people living with cancer of the colon or rectum that had spread to other organs in the body, known as metastatic colorectal cancer, lived longer taking a medicine called fruquintinib than people taking a placebo (an inactive pill that would not affect the cancer, such as a sugar pill). Fruquintinib is a medicine taken by mouth, as a capsule, that slows the development of blood vessels around a tumor, reducing the chance that it will get bigger or spread.FRESCO-2 included adults who had received all available standard treatments for their cancer, including fluoropyrimidine, oxaliplatin, and irinotecan chemotherapy. Patients were assigned, by chance, to take fruquintinib (461 patients) or placebo (230 patients) once daily for 3 weeks, followed by 1 week off when they did not take fruquintinib or placebo (known as a treatment cycle). Patients continued to take fruquintinib or placebo (alongside supportive treatment to help them to feel as well as possible) in 4-week treatment cycles until their cancer worsened, or until they had a harmful side effect.What are the key takeaways?Patients who took fruquintinib lived longer than patients who took placebo. The time until patients’ disease got worse was longer for those taking fruquintinib compared with placebo. More patients in the fruquintinib group had tumors that stayed the same size or got smaller compared with the placebo group. In patients who took fruquintinib, the most common side effect was high blood pressure. Overall, 20% of patients stopped taking fruquintinib due to side effects, compared with 21% for placebo.What were the main conclusions reported by the researchers?The time that it took for the cancer to worsen was longer for patients who took fruquintinib, compared with those who took placebo. The side effects with fruquintinib were manageable. Based on these results, fruquintinib was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2023, and in Europe and Japan in 2024.Who is this article intended for?This summary may be helpful for people who are interested in learning about metastatic colorectal cancer, fruquintinib, or the FRESCO-2 study.[Box: see text].