Current status and research progress of perioperative chemotherapy in advanced gastric cancer

Recently the standard treatment for advanced gastric cancer is the multimodal therapies associated with complete surgical resection of cancer (D2 dissection) and now more and more clinical attentions have been paid to chemotherapy. It has been confirmed by several randomized phase III( clinical trials that adjuvant chemotherapy after D2 dissection can significantly improve patients' survival. But it is still in debate that perioperative chemotherapy(adjuvant and neoadjuvant) and postoperative radiotherapy can really bring survival benefits for gastric cancer patients who received curative D2 dissections. Based on these questions, investigators designed different ongoing clinical trials in order to define subsets of patients who will more likely benefit from specific therapies and optimize the regimens and sequence. Meanwhile, along with the deep research of gastric cancer biomarkers and introduction of novel molecular subtypes of gastric cancer based on cancer genome atlas project, personalized or individual chemotherapy treatment will come into reality for improving survival and having better life quality for gastric cancer patients.