Kanan Alshammari, Director of MENA NCCN Regional Coordination Center at Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs (MNG-HA), shared a post on LinkedIn:
“I’m pleased to share the publication of our multicenter study on advanced biliary tract cancer (BTC) in Saudi Arabia, now out in Frontiers-Oncology.
Metastatic BTC remains a rare but increasingly relevant diagnosis in our region, with little local evidence to inform prognosis and treatment decisions. Motivated by this gap, we set out to characterize outcomes within our own patient population.
This required close collaboration across five major Saudi cancer centers; Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs (MNGHA), King Fahad Medical City, Prince Faisal Cancer Center, King Saud University Cancer Center, King Abdullah Medical City, and Saudi Society of GI Oncology (SSGO) – culminating in a cohort of 271 patients diagnosed with de novo advanced BTC between 2016 and 2023.
Key findings:
- Median overall survival was 9.5 months in the full cohort, consistent with global real-world data, though treatment exposure remained limited with only about a third of patients received 2nd line therapy.
- Patients achieving disease control on first-line therapy had significantly longer survival.
- Molecular testing was performed in only 12% of patients, yet over half of those tested had actionable alterations – highlighting a clear gap in access to precision oncology tools.
- Patients receiving chemo-immunotherapy in the 1st line setting and the longest median overall survival reaching 11.8 months.
This is the first RWE study that describes outcomes of mBTC in our region, including outcomes of chemo-immunotherapy, and genomics.
This collaboration is a step toward evidence-based, regionally relevant care for BTC patients.
We hope this work informs future registries, broader access to chemo-immunotherapy, and routine molecular profiling across the region.
I am thankful to all co-investigators involved, who made this important project, a reality: Bader Alshamsan, Emad Tashkandi, Mohammed Algarni, Mohammed Alghamdi, Ali Alfakeeh, Abdulhameed Alfagih.”
Title: Survival outcomes and prognostic factors in de novo advanced biliary tract cancer: insights from a Saudi multicenter cohort
Authors: Bader Alshamsan, Emad Tashkandi, Mohammed Alghamdi, Ali Alfakeeh, Ali Alzahrani, Abdulhameed Alfagih, Mohammad Alkaiyat, Syed Zia Ul Hasan, Husam Shehata, Reham Alghandour, Mohammad Zuhdy, Ahmed Abdelhalim, Mohammed Algarni
Read the Full Article on Frontiers-Oncology
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