Dr. Edith Mitchell

Last night, Dr. Edith Mitchell of Thomas Jefferson University Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia, PA, updated colorectal cancer patients on the latest research and treatment news in an online webinar.

Dr. Mitchell highlighted the most important news for colon and rectal cancer patients to come from the 2011 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium held in San Francisco last month. She answer such questions as…

“Can doctors determine the chances that my cancer may return?”

“Can my doctors determine if I need chemotherapy?”

“Does Avastin or Erbitux benefit my stage III cancer treatment?”

“Are there any promising new treatments on the horizon?”

Read the rest of this entry »

The first genomic test to predict whether or not stage II colon cancer will recur has been developed and validated in a large number of tumor tissue samples from patients in the United States and the United Kingdom.  The 12 gene assay can reliably predict whether an individual patient has a low, intermediate, or high risk of having their cancer return.

Doctors and patients will be able to use the Recurrence Score, along with other clinical indicators, to decide whether further chemotherapy treatment after surgery should be considered or whether they can safely skip chemo and its risks.

However, the study was not able to link recurrence scores with benefits from 5-FU and leucovorin chemotherapy. Read the rest of this entry »