Neoadjuvant and Adjuvant Chemotherapy for Cholangiocarcinoma

Cholangiocarcinoma consists of a heterogeneous group of aggressive and rare malignancies that arise from the bile ducts outside or inside the liver. Although surgical resection remains the only potential curative treatment option for patients with cholangiocarcinoma, curative surgery is only possible in a small number of cases. Furthermore, recurrence rates are high even among patients who undergo surgical resection. Unfortunately, a significant proportion of patients present with locally advanced, unresectable disease. Recently, neoadjuvant chemotherapy has emerged as a promising method to identify patients with poor prognosis, avoiding pathological and non-therapeutic resection, as well as potentially downstaging tumors which cannot be resected initially. This therapeutic strategy has the potential to improve local and distant control, to achieve R0 resection and to prevent distant metastasis. However, few data are currently available supporting neoadjuvant chemotherapy in cholangiocarcinoma and several questions remains unanswered. Adjuvant chemotherapy is administered after surgery to eradicate any remaining cancer cells with the goal of reducing the chances of recurrence. And chemotherapy is also frequently used in cholangiocarcinoma as an adjunct to surgical resection, but the appropriate sequence of chemotherapy with surgery is unclear.