Encorafenib Plus Cetuximab in a Neoadjuvant Setting in Patients With BRAF Mutation Localised Colon or Upper Rectum Cancer

This is a pilot trial which aims to assess the concept of anti-BRAF neoadjuvant treatment (encorafenib) in combination with cetuximab in patients with colon cancer or rT3/T4 supra-peritoneal upper rectal cancer based on a pre-operative CT-scan. About 10% of patients will have a mutated BRAF V600E tumour and the objective is to include 30 patients with this mutation.

If the tumour is not confirmed as a carrier of the BRAF V600E mutation or has an RAS mutation according to centralised assessment, treatment will be discontinued in this patient and cancer surgery will be organised as soon as possible. The patient will be excluded from the statistical analysis and will be replaced by a new patient in order to obtain 30 patients with confirmed BRAF V600E mutation and RAS wild type . It should be noted that less than a 3% discrepancy between the numbers of local laboratory results and central analysis results, has been reported in over 600 BRAF V600E mutated colon cancers in the BEACON CRC study. Based on these figures, there should be 0 or 1 patient with discrepant results in the study presented here.

Furthermore, in the hypothetical case of a patient who is an early permanent discontinuation of the study prior to surgery, this patient will be replaced in order to obtain a total of 30 patients who underwent surgery after neoadjuvant treatment.