Watch Nancy Roach tell AACR members and advocates how they can join the effort for cancer research funding.

Speaking at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, Nancy said,

If public funding for biomedical research matters to you, get involved.

Nancy represented the voice of advocates in an AACR discussion of The Outlook for Cancer Research Funding in the Coming Years: The Importance of Advocacy and Government Relations.

She was joined by former Illinois Congressman John Edward Porter, Shannon K. Bell from the NCI Office of Advocacy Relations, and Jon G. Retzlaff who is the managing director of Science Policy and Government Affairs for AACR.

You can also hear John Edward Porter and Shannon Bell on the AACR website.

Jon Chung PhD

The 2011 Fight Colorectal Cancer-AACR Fellowship, in memory of Lisa Dubow, has been awarded to Jon H. Chung, PhD  from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

His proposed research is Hedgehog Pathway Targeted Therapeutics for Metastatic Colorectal Cancer.

With the award, Dr. Chung will study alternatives to the traditional Hedgehog signaling pathway in colon cancer cells.  He will explore crosstalk within the cell between the Hedgehog and Wnt pathways and screen for drugs that block both pathways at the same time, potentially stopping cancer development. Read the rest of this entry »

Too many people avoid colonoscopy.  Too invasive, they say.  Too scary, too risky.

There may be an answer for them in an improved stool test that looks for DNA that is changed in both colorectal cancer and some precancerous polyps.

Of course, if the stool test identifies possible polyps or cancer, a colonoscopy is critical to evaluate the findings and remove polyps.

The test that looks for methylated DNA in human feces, found 85 percent of cancers and 64 percent of large adenomas.  There were few false positives.  Only one in ten follow-up colonoscopies didn’t confirm cancer or adenomas. Read the rest of this entry »

Patients, care partners, survivors, advocates . . . everyone.  It’s Our Time!

Watch a video about the promise of cancer research — and its urgency — from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).

Dr. Chou discussing his poster at AACR

Both Dr. Jeffrey Chou and Dr. Yaguang Xi presented research posters at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting in Washington this week.

Dr. Chou is the 2009 Lisa Dubow Research Fellow, and Dr. Xi received the award in 2008.

Dr. Xi’s research found a micro-RNA (miRNA) that made colorectal cancer cells more sensitive to 5-FU and also predicted which cells, and potentially which patients, response best to treatment with 5-FU.

Dr. Chou studied whether treating colorectal cancer cells with decitabine (DAC) could produce cancer-testis antigen in the cells and make them sensitive to immunotherapy. Read the rest of this entry »