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Chemotherapy

How useful is adjuvant irinotecan in stage IV CRC?

Patients who undergo hepatic surgery for initially resectable liver metastases from colorectal cancer have a 70% risk of relapse. A recent phase III randomized trial has failed to demonstrate an improvement in disease-free survival with the addition of irinotecan to 5-fluorouracil and folinic acid as adjuvant treatment for patients with radically resected colorectal cancer with liver metastases.

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Correspondence to Alfredo Falcone.

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Competing interests

Fotios Loupakis declares no competing interests. Alfredo Falcone declares associations with the following companies: Amgen, Merck and Roche (consultant, speaker's bureau, grant support) and Sanofi-Aventis (grant support).

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Loupakis, F., Falcone, A. How useful is adjuvant irinotecan in stage IV CRC?. Nat Rev Clin Oncol 7, 190–191 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrclinonc.2010.32

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