Hans de Wilt, Professor of Surgical Oncology at the Department of Surgery, St Radboud University Medical Centre Nijmegen, The Netherlands gives a preview of his presentation 'CAIRO4: The role of surgery of the primary tumour with few or absent symptoms in patients with synchronous unresectable metastases of colorectal cancer'.
Professor Dr Hans de Wilt started his surgical training in 1994 and completed his PhD studying isolated limb- and liver perfusion techniques in preclinical models in 1999. For this he received a Dutch Cancer Society research grant for clinical residents.
After he obtained his board certification in General Surgery in the Netherlands in 2000 he was awarded a Dutch Cancer Society Clinical Fellowship. During this fellowship he worked as a clinical research fellow in Surgical Oncology at the Sydney Melanoma Unit, Sydney, Australia. From 2001 on he worked as a staff surgeon at the Department of Surgical Oncology, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam. In June 2009 he started as the Division Head and Professor of Surgical Oncology at the Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is a former president of the Dutch Society of Surgical Oncology. He published more than 350 articles in peer-reviewed journals and his clinical interest is in colorectal cancer and surgical oncology. He is principal investigator of several (inter)national colorectal, breast and GI cancer studies, including the CAIRO 4 study.
The CAIRO4 study is a multicentre, randomized, phase III study. Patients with synchronous unresectable metastases of CRC and few or absent symptoms of the primary tumour are randomized 1:1 between systemic therapy only, and resection of the primary tumour followed by systemic therapy. Systemic therapy consists of fluoropyrimidine-based chemotherapy in combination with bevacizumab. The primary objective of this study is to determine the clinical benefit in terms of overall survival of initial resection of the primary tumour. Secondary endpoints include progression free survival, surgical morbidity, quality of life and the number of patients requiring resection of the primary tumour in the control arm.
The inclusion of patients has been reached in January 2021 and in the ESCP webinar preliminary results will be presented.