For people with locally advanced esophageal cancer, a chemotherapy regimen called FLOT is the preferred treatment, according to results from a large clinical trial. People treated with FLOT lived much longer than those treated with the CROSS regimen.

A treatment regimen that combines the immunotherapy drug nivolumab (Opdivo) with either another immunotherapy drug or chemotherapy may be a new initial treatment option for people with advanced esophageal cancer, a large clinical trial finds.

For some people with advanced esophageal cancer, the immunotherapy drugs pembrolizumab (Keytruda) and nivolumab (Opdivo) may become part of early treatment for the disease, according to results from two large clinical trials.

FDA has approved the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab (Keytruda) to treat some patients with advanced esophageal cancer. Patients must have certain levels of the protein PD-L1 on their tumors, as determined by an FDA-approved test.

A new study by The Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network could help classify esophageal cancers according to their genetic and molecular alterations and identify potential new treatment options.

Patients with esophageal cancer who received chemotherapy and radiation before surgery survived, on average, nearly twice as long as patients treated with surgery alone, according to results of a randomized clinical trial published May 31, 2012, in the New England Journal of Medicine.