Prof Dan Aderka talks to ecancer about the BEACON study which was initiated on patients with BRAF mutations who had undergone first-line treatment and were subsequently assigned to either a control arm or one of two treatment arms consisting either of doublet or triplet-therapy in order to compare treatment efficacy.

He discusses the retrospective subgroup analysis subsequently carried out on those patients by dividing them into those who had received bevacizumab during first-line therapy and those who had not.

He talks about the fact that bevacizumab may interfere with cetuximab administration during second-line treatment due to its long half-life and that the benefit of administering bevacizumab during first-line treatment may actually be reduced during second-line treatment leading to a net zero effect.

Prof Aderka discusses whether current treatment could be reversed by administering the BEACON combination first and bevacizumab second in order to improve outcomes, although he states that further research is needed to confirm this data.

Finally, he talks about the clinical and scientific implications of the results of this retrospective study.