Neoadjuvant Therapy

Neoadjuvant therapy is the administration of therapeutic agents before a main treatment, aiming to reduce the size or extent of a cancer before a radical treatment intervention such as surgery, making the procedure easier and more likely to succeed while reducing the consequences of a more extensive technique that would otherwise be required. It is commonly used for cancers that are locally advanced, such as pancreatic cancer, using systemic therapy such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy or hormone therapy, or radiation therapy, and can act on undetected micrometastatic disease, with downstaging serving as a surrogate marker of efficacy against that hidden disease. Some neoadjuvant therapy can turn an untreatable tumor treatable by shrinking its volume, a use called conversion therapy, and magnetic resonance imaging can sometimes predict how a patient will respond to the treatment, for example in ovarian cancer.