Dr. Bekaii-Saab on the Impact of the BEACON CRC Study in BRAF-Mutated CRC

Tanios S. Bekaii-Saab, MD, professor of medicine, Mayo Clinic, discusses the impact of the phase III BEACON CRC trial in patients with BRAF V600E-mutant metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC).

The field of mCRC is starting to adopt more of a precision medicine approach, Bekaii-Saab says. Researchers have a better understanding of the role of BRAF, HER2, and RAS, although there are not yet any RAS-targeted therapies. Significant progress has been made in the BRAF space, where patients traditionally had a very poor prognosis with very limited options.

The BEACON CRC study, which looked at the triplet regimen of encorafenib (Braftovi), binimetinib (Mektovi), and cetuximab (Erbitux), led to a 48% reduction in the risk of death compared with cetuximab and irinotecan-containing regimens in patients with BRAF V600E mutations. Response rates also increased from about 2% with the combination of chemotherapy and cetuximab to approximately 27% with the triplet. This is a transformative study because this patient population had very little benefit from chemotherapy and zero benefit from EGFR inhibition.