REVIEW article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Gastrointestinal Cancers: Gastric and Esophageal Cancers
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1637657
This article is part of the Research TopicReal-World Clinical and Translational Research in Gastrointestinal CancersView all 15 articles
Immunotherapy in Conversion Therapy for Gastric Cancer: Current Status, Progress, and Challenges
Provisionally accepted
- 1Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, China
- 2Affiliated Hospital of Hebei University, Baoding, China
- 3Capital Medical University Affiliated Beijing Friendship Hospital, Beijing, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Abstract：Gastric cancer remains a global health burden due to its late diagnosis and poor prognosis. Conversion therapy aims to make the initially unresectable tumor resectable through systemic treatment, providing the opportunity for long-term survival. The rise of immunotherapy has brought new potential to this field. Immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy, anti-angiogenic drugs or chemoradiotherapy has shown good efficacy in specific patients. This review summarizes the current evidence of conversion strategies based on immunotherapy, emphasizes key biomarkers, and explores the future direction of precise, multi-modal treatment. Keywords：Gastric cancer; Immunotherapy; Conversion therapy; R0 resection rate；Multimodal therapyGastric cancer remains one of the most prevalent and lethal malignancies globally, with high incidence, low early detection rates, and poor survival outcomes. According to GLOBOCAN 2020, gastric cancer ranks fifth in incidence and fourth in cancer-related mortality worldwide, with approximately 1.09 million new cases and 769,000 deaths annually (1,2). Nearly half of these cases occur in China, where the early detection rate remains below 30%, resulting in 60%-70% of patients being diagnosed at a locally advanced (stage III) or metastatic (stage IV) stage. Correspondingly, five-year survival drops to ~30% for stage III and below 10% for stage IV disease.Due to the lack of early symptoms and effective screening programs, most patients are diagnosed with advanced-stage disease(3,4).Traditional surgical resection and monotherapy chemotherapy are insufficient to meet the clinical needs of patients with advanced disease. As such, there is growing interest in multidisciplinary strategies aimed at converting initially unresectable tumors into resectable ones.
Keywords: gastric cancer, Immunotherapy, Conversion therapy, R0 resection rate, multimodal therapy
Received: 29 May 2025; Accepted: 05 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Su, Zhang and Deng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yi Su, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.