Are you done — or almost done — with your treatment for colon cancer?

Will you help answer a question about how to help colon cancer survivors  increase their physical activity?

You’ll learn more about colon cancer and may be randomly assigned to a special interactive program that is designed to help recovering colon cancer patients develop a healthy lifestyle.

The Survivorship Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS) study is available in centers in Wisconsin, Texas, North Carolina, and Connecticut.  To be part of the research, you need to have completed treatment for stage I, II, or III colon cancer within the past 12 months.  Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Lenz

Because of the overwhelming response to my earlier post on PRI724, I wanted to clarify a little bit more about this trial and other trials available for patients with advanced colorectal cancer who have received all standard of care regimens including FOLFOX, FOLFIRI, Avastin and Erbitux (if they were wild-type KRAS).

Of course we will have PRI724. The reason we are so excited because it is the first in class to inhibit a pathway so essential for colon cancer stem cells.

The IND is filed at the FDA, which means we need to wait 30 days for the FDA to respond. If they have concerns, we need to answer them. When they agree, we will go ahead to get institutional review board (IRB) approval. We already have scientific approval from the Cancer Center Scientific Review. Once we have IRB approval we are ready to go.

In the first phase any solid tumor is eligible. However, phase I trials are heavily regulated, so patients need to meet eligibility criteria, which means almost normal function of renal, liver, blood etc. They have to be in reasonable shape (able to do their daily activities). We anticipate that this trial may open at the beginning of November. Read the rest of this entry »

The House is set to vote this afternoon on the Improving Access to Clinical Trials Act of 2010 (S. 1674) introduced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).

The bill provides that the first $2,000 per year received by an individual for participation in a clinical trial shall not be counted as income for the purpose of calculating Social Security benefits.  This provision was included in the House-passed health care reform bill last November, but was not included in the final bill the President signed into law in March.

The Senate already passed this bill on August 5.  House passage later today will clear the bill for review and signature by the President.

In disappointing news, adding the Hedgehog inhibitor GDC-0449 to standard chemotherapy failed to increase the time before advanced colorectal cancer got worse.

Researchers compared progression-free survival between patients who got either FOLFOX or FOLFIRI chemotherapy with Avastin and a group who got the same chemo regimen with GDC-0449. There was no difference Read the rest of this entry »

Adding Erbitux® (cetuximab) to standard chemotherapy for stage III colon cancer didn’t improve patient outcomes and added more side effects.

All of the patients in the NO147 trial had cancer that had spread to their lymph nodes and had surgery before beginning chemotherapy. They had normal or wild-type KRAS genes in their tumors.They were randomly assigned to FOLFOX chemotherapy for 6 months or FOLFOX plus Erbitux. 

The trial was closed before the planned number of patients were enrolled because an analysis showed that there was no benefit to the additional Erbitux and continuing the trial would not help patients. Read the rest of this entry »