The potential benefit of encorafenib plus cetuximab with chemotherapy compared with standard of care in people with BRAF V600E-mutant metastatic colorectal cancer in the BREAKWATER study: a plain language summary

Scott Kopetz; Takayuki Yoshino; Eric Van Cutsem; Cathy Eng; Tae Won Kim; Harpreet Singh Wasan; Jayesh Desai; Fortunato Ciardiello; Rona Yaeger; Timothy S Maughan; Elena Beyzarov; Xiaoxi Zhang; Graham Ferrier; Xiaosong Zhang; Josep Tabernero

doi:10.1080/14796694.2025.2491290

The potential benefit of encorafenib plus cetuximab with chemotherapy compared with standard of care in people with BRAF V600E-mutant metastatic colorectal cancer in the BREAKWATER study: a plain language summary

Future Oncol. 2025 Jun;21(13):1541-1552. doi: 10.1080/14796694.2025.2491290. Epub 2025 May 20.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ aUniversity of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA.
² bNational Cancer Center Hospital East, Kashiwa, Japan.
³ cUniversity Hospitals Gasthuisberg Leuven and KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
⁴ dVanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Nashville, TN, USA.
⁵ eAsan Medical Center, University of Ulsan College of Medicine, Seoul, South Korea.
⁶ fHammersmith Hospital, Division of Cancer, Imperial College London, London, UK.
⁷ gPeter MacCallum Cancer Centre and the University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
⁸ hUniversity of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Naples, Italy.
⁹ iMemorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA.
¹⁰ jUniversity of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.
¹¹ kPfizer, Inc., New York, NY, USA.
¹² lPfizer, Inc., South San Francisco, CA, USA.
¹³ mVall d'Hebron Hospital Campus and Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), University of Vic - Central University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain.

No abstract available

Plain language summary

What is this summary about?BRAF V600E-mutant metastatic colorectal cancer is difficult to treat as people often do not respond to standard of care treatment and their cancer gets worse. The BREAKWATER study looked at whether encorafenib plus cetuximab with mFOLFOX6 was a better treatment than standard of care to treat this disease.What were the results?More participants in the encorafenib plus cetuximab with mFOLFOX6 group had their tumor shrink after treatment than those in the standard of care group (61% versus 40%). Participants in the encorafenib plus cetuximab and mFOLFOX6 group might live longer after starting treatment than those in the standard of care group. The side effects reported were expected by researchers.What do the results mean?Encorafenib plus cetuximab and mFOLFOX6 is the new standard of care for this cancer.[Box: see text].