Virological response and effectiveness of chemoradiation therapy for anal cancer: relationship and predictive capabilities

The effectiveness of chemoradiation therapy (CRT) is conventionally assessed in terms of achieving clinical complete response (CCR), overall and event-free survival. Anal cancer (AR) is considered as one of the cancer diseases with a proven etiological agent: the human papillomavirus (HPV). The search for biomarkers to predict the effectiveness of CRT is always relevant, and an assessment of virological response (VR) may be useful for this purpose.