Summary

Colorectal cancer is the 3rd most common malignant disease worldwide and it represents the major public health issue. Nowadays, multidisciplinary approach is common in diagnostics and treatment of all malignant diseases, rectal cancer is an example for importance of vario-us medical disciplines collaboration in achieving optimal treatment outcome. This paper is a short overview of most important clinical trials which defined optimal therapeutical approach to the patients with locally advanced rectal cancer. Actual guidelines and recommendations for treatment of patients with stage II or III rectal cancer include preoperative radiotherapy (RT) with or without concurrent chemotherapy, and radical surgical resection (with mandatory total mesorectal excision-TME). Such multidisciplinary approach to the therapy of these patients si-gnificantly reduced rates of local recurrence, and increased likelihood of pathologic complete response and sphincter-preserving surgery, with low rates of acute treatment toxicity. In order to further improve treatment outcomes, there are ongoing studies which investigate novel systemic drugs (immunotherapy-antibody-drug conjugates) as well as modern radiotherapy techniques (IMRT- intensity modulated RT, IGRT- image guided RT, VMAT- volumetric modulated arch RT) in patients with rectal cancer