Pancreatic Cancer Collective scientists, Dr. Carl June and Dr. David Tuveson suggest CAR T cell therapies can require as little as three days of culture time at SITC 2018.

Receiving the Nobel prize is an extraordinary lifetime achievement, but the impact of Dr. Jim Allison’s research can be life-changing for the patients who benefit, as shared in this personal account.

The American Cancer Society (ACS) has released an updated guideline for colorectal cancer screening. Among the major guideline changes, the new recommendations say screening should begin at age 45 for people at average risk. Previously, the guideline recommended screening begin at age 50 for people at average risk. Recommendations for screening test options are also part of the guideline changes.

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Charles S. Fuchs, MD, co-leader of the SU2C Colorectal Cancer Dream Team, is also head of a research that recently reported an intriguing finding: people with stage III colon cancer who regularly eat nuts are at significantly lower risk of cancer recurrence and mortality than those who don’t. The study followed 826 participants in a clinical trial for a median of 6.5 years after they were treated with surgery and chemotherapy. Those who regularly consumed at least two, one-ounce servings of nuts each week demonstrated a 42% improvement in disease-free survival and a 57% improvement in overall survival, according to a paper published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Earlier research among patients with colon cancer has indicated that patients are more likely to have poor outcomes when lifestyle factors such as obesity, high carbohydrate diet and lack of exercise increases their insulin resistance or raises blood sugar levels. “These studies support the hypothesis that behaviors that make you less insulin resistant, including eating nuts, seem to improve outcomes in colon cancer,” Fuchs said. “However, we don’t know yet what exactly about nuts is beneficial.” Nuts also might play a positive role by satisfying hunger with less intake of carbohydrates or other foods associated with poor outcomes, Fuchs noted. Dr. Fuchs is director of the Yale Cancer Center and physician-in-chief at the Smilow Cancer Hospital.

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Dr. Janne and the SU2C-American Cancer Society Lung Cancer Dream Team have been focused on treating lung cancer patients with mutant KRAS. In this new publication, they report that a subgroup of patients with mutant KRAS may benefit from drugs called MEK inhibitors, if these patients do not have as much of the non-mutant KRAS protein. This information is helpful in deciding what treatments can be used for certain patients with mutant KRAS.

Ependymomas are a type of brain tumor that is notoriously difficult to treat. Scientists with the SU2C-St. Baldrick’s Foundation Pediatric Cancer Dream Team mapped out the genetic landscape of selected ependymomas to find targets for treatment and reported encouraging preliminary data on the identification of drugs that could have an impact on the tumors. Their report, with Michael D. Taylor, MD, PhD, a principal investigator with the Dream Team, as a senior author, is published in Nature, the highest-ranked journal of general and multidisciplinary science in the world. Our colleagues at the American Association for Cancer Research have prepared the attached Science Update on the paper, discussing its importance in the quest to find treatments for these tumors that occur most often in infants and children. 

Emily Whitehead, the little girl who was first person ever to receive the CAR-T treatment for leukemia, has been named one of the “ten people who mattered this year” by Nature, the world’s most influential journal of multidisciplinary science, marking FDA approval of the treatment, supported by SU2C research. “A young girl’s battle against leukemia inspired a new generation of cancer therapy,” Nature noted. Crystal Mackall, MD, co-leader of the SU2C-St. Baldrick’s Foundation Pediatric Cancer Dream Team, says the treatment is a “watershed.” Emily’s story is also told in this video from the 2014 SU2C telecast. 

Kara Bernstein, PhD, recipient of a 2016 Innovative Research Grant (IRG) from SU2C, is featured in a story on “Meet Three Women Breaking New Ground in Research” in the Media Planet supplement to USA TODAY on Education and Career News. Dr. Bernstein is at the University of Pittsburgh. She is using her IRG to study factors affecting predisposition to cancer.

Hans Clevers, MD, PhD, leader of the SU2C-Dutch Cancer Society Tumor Organoids Dream Team, is featured in Science Magazine for his pioneering work on organoids, which are grown in the lab from small samples of cells taken from tumor tissue. They can be used to study patients’ tumors and to test new drugs. The Dream Team is focusing on colon cancer, breast cancer, and pancreatic cancer.

Scientists supported by Stand Up To Cancer have developed a test that spots tiny amounts of cancer-specific DNA in blood, allowing them to identify people with early-stage colorectal, breast, lung, and ovarian cancers. “This study shows that identifying cancer early using DNA changes in the blood is feasible and that our high accuracy sequencing method is a promising approach to achieve this goal,” says Victor Velculescu, MD, PhD, professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and co-leader of the SU2C-Dutch Cancer Society Dream Team on Molecular Early Detection of Colorectal Cancer (MEDOCC). A report on the research, performed on blood and tumor tissue samples from 200 people with all stages of cancer in the U.S., Denmark and the Netherlands, appears as the cover story in the Aug. 16, 2017, issue of Science Translational Medicine, a major scientific journal.