Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2020. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastrointest Oncol. Aug 15, 2020; 12(8): 808-832
Published online Aug 15, 2020. doi: 10.4251/wjgo.v12.i8.808
Early stage colon cancer: Current treatment standards, evolving paradigms, and future directions
Sakti Chakrabarti, Carrie Y Peterson, Deepika Sriram, Amit Mahipal
Sakti Chakrabarti, Deepika Sriram, Division of Hematology/Oncology, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI 53226, United States
Carrie Y Peterson, Department of Surgery, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI 53226, United States
Amit Mahipal, Division of Medical Oncology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN 55905, United States
Author contributions: Chakrabarti S was involved in the conceptualization, data curation and writing-original draft; Sriram D was involved in the data curation, writing, review and editing; Peterson CY was involved in the data curation, writing, review and editing; Mahipal A performed the data curation, writing, review and editing. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: There is no conflict of interest associated with any of the senior author or other coauthors contributed their efforts in this manuscript. All the authors have no conflict of interest related to the manuscript.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Sakti Chakrabarti, MD, Associate Professor, Division of Hematology/Oncology, Medical College of Wisconsin, No. 8701 Watertown Plank Road, Milwaukee, WI 53226, United States. schakrabarti@mcw.edu
Received: January 21, 2020
Peer-review started: January 21, 2020
First decision: March 5, 2020
Revised: May 16, 2020
Accepted: August 1, 2020
Article in press: August 1, 2020
Published online: August 15, 2020
Processing time: 203 Days and 16.4 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Although the majority of patients with colon cancer are diagnosed in an early stage, cancer recurrence after initial curative therapy is frequent, underscoring the need for novel approaches. The challenges in the current treatment paradigm include the lack of precise patient selection tools for adjuvant therapy, disabling toxicities, and modest efficacy of the adjuvant therapies. Herein we provide a contemporaneous appraisal of the early stage colon cancer treatment and discuss how evolving technologies, including circulating tumor DNA, can potentially transform the standard of care.