SUMMARY

At the background of the Golden Gate Bridge with a view on the Pacific Ocean, the annual Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium was held from 17–19 January 2019 in the Moscone Congress Center in San Francisco, California. The meeting further underlined the invasion of immunotherapy in the treatment landscape of gastrointestinal tumours, both in the upper and lower digestive tract. In addition to immunotherapy, lots of efforts were made in the molecular profiling of gastrointestinal cancers in every possible tumour location, which will hopefully fuel more biomarker-driven medicine in this setting in the near future. In this report, the most important headlines will be discussed, with comments on the clinical relevance of the different studies.

(BELG J MED ONCOL 2019;13(4):142–149)