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Trials recruiting now, the landmark trials, the trials held by this cancer's subtypes, the key papers and what they mean, the latest literature, and the milestones year by year.
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The 48 most recent of 77 papers; see them all →
The IHC 3+ subgroup result is why the tumour-agnostic label is written at 3+ and not 2+, and why a gallbladder cancer with a strong HER2 stain now has two on-label choices (zanidatamab, trastuzumab deruxtecan) after chemotherapy. Lung toxicity again ran higher than in breast cancer.
Targeted therapy prevalence estimates from one country may not hold in another, so a UK cohort, with its own ancestry mix, would need its own molecular survey before assuming HER2 or other rates from Asian or Latin American series.
A direct check of the HERIZON-BTC-01 testing algorithm in routine pathology: IHC 3+ can stand alone, 2+ needs ISH, and the low-level amplification in weakly stained tumours is the group where HER2 drugs are least likely to help.
This is the UK baseline for the incidental cancer pathway: a re-resection rate well above the Dutch registry's 24 percent, with the same selection caveat. The abstract leaves out the histology, referral and timing detail; the full paper holds it.
For gallbladder cancer the points that matter are that HER2 can disappear under HER2-directed pressure, that SMAD4 co-mutation predicts a worse response, and that sequencing at progression, not just at diagnosis, may be needed to guide the next line.
Together with the JCO Precision Oncology cohort this makes residual disease testing in biliary cancer prognostic to the same degree as in colon cancer. Nobody has yet shown that acting on it helps; that is the trial gap the ideas on this page name.
The adjuvant finding sits uneasily beside BILCAP, on which NHS adjuvant capecitabine rests; in a mostly gallbladder population the benefit is not visible. ACTICCA-1 and ARTEMIDE-Biliary01 are the trials that can settle it.
It softens the Ethun four-to-eight-week rule: timing within the range that services can deliver probably matters less than completing the operation at all and doing it with the liver bed and nodes cleared.
Query for this cancer: (TITLE:"Gallbladder cancer" OR ABSTRACT:"Gallbladder cancer" OR TITLE:"Gallbladder carcinoma" OR ABSTRACT:"Gallbladder carcinoma" OR TITLE:"Carcinoma of the gallbladder" OR ABSTRACT:"Carcinoma of the gallbladder" OR TITLE:"Gall bladder cancer" OR ABSTRACT:"Gall bladder cancer" OR TITLE:"Biliary tract cancer of the gallbladder" OR ABSTRACT:"Biliary tract cancer of the gallbladder" OR TITLE:"GBC" OR ABSTRACT:"GBC") AND (treatment OR therapy OR trial OR survival OR diagnosis). Results are unfiltered search hits about Gallbladder cancer, not a curated reading list.
Maximilian de Stoll describes gallbladder carcinoma at autopsy in Vienna.
Lazarus Hospital, Berlin, July 1882 (Hardy 1993; Traverso 1976). The operation for gallstones through which most gallbladder cancers are still discovered.
Glenn and Hays describe en bloc liver-bed resection with lymphadenectomy.
Sixty-six cases and 399 from the literature; essentially all found incidentally at gallstone surgery.
Diehl's case-control study finds an odds ratio of 10.1 for stones of 3 cm or more.
The GES programme, the world's only national prophylactic cholecystectomy policy against gallbladder cancer; 284,139 notifications by 2024.
Pawlik and colleagues, six centres, 115 patients: the observational basis for re-resecting T1b or deeper tumours.
ABC-02 (NEJM 2010) in a mixed biliary population including gallbladder cancer.
The AJCC 7th edition stages carcinoma of the cystic duct with gallbladder cancer.
57 Chinese tumours: TP53 47%, ERBB3 12%, ErbB pathway in 37% with worse survival (Li et al., Nature Genetics).
Shindoh and colleagues' international series (437 patients) separates peritoneal-side from hepatic-side T2 disease: five-year survival 42.6 versus 64.7 percent.
260 Japanese biliary cancers: FGFR2 fusions intrahepatic, APOBEC signature and ELF3 in gallbladder and extrahepatic tumours (Nakamura et al., Nature Genetics).
79 patients, two-year survival 65 percent; no randomised trial has followed.
T2 is split into T2a and T2b and N stage is defined by the number of involved nodes (N1 one to three, N2 four or more).
The Indian genome-wide association study finds common variants at ABCB1 and ABCB4 that raise gallbladder cancer risk.
Ethun and colleagues, ten US centres, 207 patients; a 2026 individual patient data meta-analysis found no difference by timing.
Six months of capecitabine after resection of biliary tract cancer becomes the adjuvant standard.
The digestive system volume standardises the nomenclature of gallbladder carcinoma and its precursors (biliary intraepithelial neoplasia, intracholecystic papillary neoplasm).
167 tumours from Korea, India and Chile: ELF3 frameshift neoantigens, CTNNB1, STK11 and Wnt alterations (Pandey et al., Nature Communications).
Median overall survival 6.2 vs 5.3 months; one-year survival 25.9 vs 11.4 percent. NIFTY (liposomal irinotecan) published the same year.
ESGAR, EAES, EFISDS and ESGE set size and risk-factor rules for cholecystectomy and ultrasound follow-up.
First immunotherapy survival benefit in biliary tract cancer; FDA approval September 2022.
244 samples: TP53 63%, CDKN2A 21%, ERBB2 15%, KRAS 11%, actionable alterations in 35% of patients (Giraldo et al., Clinical Cancer Research).
Zanidatamab response rate 41.3 percent in HER2-positive disease after chemotherapy.
FDA accelerated approval (November 2024) on HERIZON-BTC-01, in which gallbladder cancer was the largest subgroup.
376 Indian patients (Suryavanshi et al.) and 56 Chilean tumours (Erices et al.) give the high-incidence regions their own frequencies.
36-month survival 14.6 vs 6.9 percent with durvalumab. Residual disease hazard ratios of 26 (2025) and 15.86 (2026) in two cohorts.
285 incidental cancers and 516 operated patients across 24 centres, 2014 to 2022; 67.7 percent of incidental cancers had liver resection.