Predictive biomarkers to ramucirumab in Asian metastatic gastric cancer patients: Circulating angiogenic factors of VEGFR2 and neurophilin as predictive to ramucirumab efficacy in Asain recurrent/metatatic gastric cancer patients.

e15536Background: We conducted an exploratory study to identify potential biomarkers to predict therapeutic effect of ramucirumab in combination with paclitaxel as a second line treatment for recurrent/metastatic Korean gastric cancer (GC) patients. Methods: We retrospectively reviewed clinical efficacay and toxicity in 70 GC patients who received ramucirumab with weekly paclitaxel in an open-label expanded access program after failure to first line chemotherapy. To find potential biomarker of ramucirumab, we investigated the association between efficacy of ramucirumab and tissue molecular characteristics (EBV, MMR, HER2, EGFR, C-MET etc.). Also, we measured circulating biomarkers (VEGF, sVEGFR2, HGF, neuropillin-1, IL-8, and PIGF,) by ELISA method before and after treatment in a subset of patients (n = 44 vs. n = 14, respectively). Results: With the median follow up of 3.1 months (range 0.5~7.6 months), the median progression free survival (PFS) was 3.9 months (95% CI, 3.3~4.6months), and median overall ...