Colorectal Cancer Research

A shorter course of chemotherapy following surgery may be preferred to longer treatment for some patients with colon cancer, results of an international collaborative study suggest.

Drs. Philip Rosenberg and William Anderson of NCI discuss a recent study on which they were coauthors that reported an increase in colorectal cancer incidence among adults under age 50 in the United States.

In a study of an immune therapy for colorectal cancer that involved a single patient, researchers identified a method for targeting the cancer-causing protein produced by a mutant form of the KRAS gene.

A blog post on a study showing that in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer, the location in the colon where the tumor originated appears to strongly influence how long patients live.

African Americans younger than age 50 had significantly worse 5-year survival rates at every stage of disease compared with young white and Hispanic patients, a new study shows.

In a small clinical trial of people with an inherited condition that greatly increases gastrointestinal cancer risk, a two-drug combination shrank precancerous lesions in the duodenum.

A missing hormone in obese mice may help explain a longstanding association between obesity and an increased risk of colorectal cancer in humans.

The FDA has approved a single drug that combines trifluridine and tipiracil to treat patients with metastatic colorectal cancer whose disease progressed after standard treatment.

In an international randomized phase III trial, the investigational drug TAS-102 extended the lives of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer whose disease had progressed following standard therapies.

A new study suggests that dense bacterial communities called biofilms may promote the development of some colorectal cancers.

New research suggests that identifying specific changes in the gut microbiome could potentially help screen patients for colorectal cancer.

Investigators who analyzed 95 human colorectal tumor samples have determined how gene alterations identified in previous analyses of the same samples are expressed at the protein level. The integration of proteomic and genomic data, or proteogenomics, provides a more comprehensive view of the biological features that drive cancer than genomic analysis alone.

In this trial, patients with resected stage III colon cancer are being randomly assigned to receive a type of chemotherapy called FOLFOX for either 3 months or 6 months and to take either an aspirin-like pill called celecoxib (Celebrex®) or a matching placebo pill for 3 years.

In the current clinical trial, dubbed PROSPECT, patients with locally advanced, resectable rectal cancer will be randomly assigned to receive either standard neoadjuvant chemoradiation therapy or neoadjuvant FOLFOX chemotherapy, with chemoradiation reserved for those patients who cannot tolerate or do not respond to FOLFOX chemotherapy.

In this phase III trial, people who have undergone curative surgery for stage 0-3 colon cancer, with or without adjuvant chemotherapy, will be randomly assigned to take sulindac and a placebo, eflornithine and a placebo, both sulindac and eflornithine, or two placebo pills for 36 months.

The pattern of genomic alterations in colon and rectal tissues is the same regardless of anatomic location or origin within the colon or the rectum, leading researchers to conclude that these two cancer types can be grouped as one, according to The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project's large-scale study of colon and rectal cancer tissue specimens.

In a large randomized trial involving healthy men and women aged 55 to 74, sigmoidoscopy substantially reduced the incidence of and mortality from colorectal cancer.

Long-term results from the National Polyp Study confirm that removing precancerous adenomas not only reduces the risk of colorectal cancer but also reduces the number of deaths from the disease by more than half. The findings appeared February 23, 2012, in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Findings from the first large clinical trial of its kind indicate that taking high doses of aspirin daily for at least 2 years substantially reduces the risk of colorectal cancer among people at increased risk of the disease.

In a randomized phase III trial, the addition of the targeted therapy cetuximab to oxaliplatin and fluoropyrimidine chemotherapy did not prolong survival or time to disease progression of patients with advanced colorectal cancer. The results were published on June 5, 2011 in The Lancet.

Cancer patients who receive the targeted therapy bevacizumab (Avastin) in combination with chemotherapy are at increased risk of serious side effects that may lead to death, according to a meta-analysis of 16 clinical trials that was published February 2, 2011, in JAMA.