Triple Therapy for Advanced Rectal Cancer: Adding Thymalfasin to Chemo-Immunotherapy

Locally advanced mid-low rectal cancer represents a significant clinical challenge, often requiring aggressive multimodal treatment strategies. Current standard approaches typically involve neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (pre-surgical treatment combining chemotherapy and radiation) to shrink tumors, often followed by surgery, and increasingly, PD-1 inhibitors (a type of immunotherapy that blocks the PD-1 protein on immune cells, allowing them to better attack cancer cells) are being integrated to improve patient outcomes. Despite these advancements, there remains a critical need to further enhance treatment efficacy, reduce recurrence rates, and improve the overall prognosis for these patients. This study addresses the specific knowledge gap of whether the addition of Thymalfasin, an immunomodulatory peptide, can synergistically improve the therapeutic benefits and favorably modulate the immune microenvironment when combined with existing neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy and PD-1 inhibitor regimens.