Clinical research status of laparoscopic gastric cancer surgery in China, Japan and South Korea

Abstract

Laparoscopic surgery has its unique minimally invasive advantages, however, taking the complex and difficult D2 lymph node dissection for advanced gastric cancer into consideration, laparoscopic gastrectomy was only applied in the treatment of early gastric cancer at its preliminary stage. With the development of more than a decade, many multicenter clinical data have confirmed the safety, feasibility and effectiveness of laparoscopic radical gastrectomy for early gastric cancer. Based on high-quality evidence-based medicine evidence, laparoscopic gastrectomy has been recommended as an optional treatment for stage I( gastric cancer by the Japanese Gastric Cancer Treatment Guidelines 2014(ver.4). However, the safety and effectiveness of laparoscopic gastrectomy for advanced gastric cancer remains controversial due to the lack of high-level evidence-based clinical evidence. Currently, China, Japan and South Korea are trying to clarify its safety and effectiveness by conducting well-designed multicenter prospective randomized controlled trials. To date, CLASS-01 trial in China, whose secondary endpoint indicated that laparoscopic gastrectomy with D2 lymphadenectomy for advanced gastric cancer can be safely performed by experienced surgeons, has provided the highest level evidence for the controversy in the world. At ASCO 2016, the safety reports from Korea's KLASS-02 trial also presented the similar conclusion. The long-term oncologic outcomes of the both researches were particularly promising. Retrospecting the whole development of gastric cancer surgery, it is not difficult to find that its mainstream direction is gradually shifted from "extended and standardized surgical resection" to "individual and precise surgery" for the safety and postoperative quality of life. The new concept of minimally invasive surgery built on laparoscopic surgery emphasizes more than shortening the surgical incision, but minimizing tissue trauma and maximizing functional preservation. On the ground of this new minimally invasive concept, surgeons have appreciated to select the most rational treatment for an individual patient. Thus, techniques focusing on further assisting laparoscopic gastrectomy with reducing trauma and preserving function, such as sentinel node navigation surgery and related fluorescence molecular imaging techniques, are increasingly being applied in gastric cancer surgery. At present, a series of researches about the feasibility of sentinel node navigation surgery and function preserving surgery associated with gastric cancer surgery are actively conducted or prepared. Results of these researches may further promote the development of laparoscopic gastrectomy and achieve the qualitative change in minimally invasive surgery in the new era.