Adjuvant Treatment and Predictors of Response in Colon Cancer

Although most newly diagnosed cases of colon cancer present as potentially curable tumors, disease recurrence after curative surgery remains a major health burden. Colon cancer is a heterogeneous disease in clinical behavior and response to treatment even within the same stage. Our emergent understanding of the complexity of cancer biology has led us to strive towards individualize therapy on the basis of relevant molecular markers. In colorectal cancer, individualized treatment is being evaluated as identification of various clinical and molecular factors have been established as prognostic or predictive of response. On the basis of these clinical and molecular markers, colon cancer should not be managed as a single disease, and the future of therapy will be to tailor treatment. In this report, we will review the role of adjuvant chemotherapy in early and locally advanced colon cancer and the role of clinical and molecular prognostic and predictive factors with a particular focus on hereditary colorectal cancer.