News from the ESTRO 2021 congress: EORTC-ESTRO RADiation Infrastructure for Europe (E2-RADIatE) OligoCare trial assesses real-world patterns of practice of radical radiotherapy for oligometastatic disease

Oligometastatic disease (OMD) is an intermediate state where a primary cancer has metastasised to a limited number of regions. However, it is not a homogenous cancer state, and this makes the determination of optimal treatment strategies difficult. Classification and characterisation of the different states of OMD has also been far from standardised. But in December 2019, a team of international experts from the EORTC and ESTRO published the first comprehensive system for the classification of OMD.

The OligoCare trial, an observational prospective cohort study of the E2-RADIatE collaboration between EORTC and ESTRO, aims to identify the patient, tumour, staging and treatment characteristics that influence overall survival (OS) after radical radiotherapy for oligometastatic breast, colorectal, prostate, and non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) disease. The study presented at ESTRO 2021 used real word data to further assess this classification system and its prognostic value.

Presenting preliminary results, Professor Dr Matthias Guckenberger, Chairman of the Department of Radiation Oncology, University Hospital of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, said that between July 2019 and February 2021, a total of 19 institutions enrolled 467 patients into the OligoCare cohort. Results presented involved 328 of those patients, and information on their primary disease, history of metastatic disease and their current OMD status formed the basis of the analysis. Prostate cancer was the most frequent primary tumour (42%) followed by colorectal cancer (23%), NSCLC (18%) and breast cancer (17%). Diagnosis of OMD included PET-imaging in 77% and MRI imaging in 16% of the patients.

“The outcome of this preliminary analysis shows the strong support of the radiation oncology community to collect high-quality prospective data, aiming to assess real-world patterns of the practice of radical radiotherapy in OMD”, says Professor Dr Piet Ost, the project’s co-principal investigator.