Dr Di Giorgio and his Curestarter team in Italy have been exploring why bowel cancer sometimes stops responding to chemotherapy. By better understanding the mechanism involved, they have discovered a potential new treatment that could help us reach a day where no life is cut short from bowel cancer.
Your generosity keeps alive a spark of hope for increasingly effective and personalised treatments for bowel cancer.
Why is this research so important?
Bowel cancer is the third most common cancer worldwide and rates are rising, especially among younger people. Chemotherapy is often used to treat bowel cancer but these drugs don’t always succeed and sadly often stop working.
Research like this is vital to help chemotherapy work better for more bowel cancer patients.
A new treatment thanks to Curestarters like you
Dr Di Giorgio has been exploring how well a new treatment could work in combination with chemotherapy as a way of improving survival rates. They hope an innovation called 'PROTAC' could also be effective for bowel cancers that have spread, which are particularly hard to cure.
Switching cancer cells back onto chemotherapy
Your DNA is like a recipe book that tells your cells how to behave and stay healthy. All your cells have the same recipe book but they don’t all need every recipe. Biological signals act like bookmarks telling your cells which recipes to use. Sometimes other factors can interfere with these bookmarks, confusing our cells. These factors are called epigenetics and they can also affect cancer cells.
Dr Di Giorgio has discovered that epigenetic factors are the reason that bowel cancer cells become resistant to certain chemotherapy drugs. His incredible team have revealed the exact mechanism involved and excitingly they have also identified a way to reverse this.
What could this mean for bowel cancer patients?
Using an innovative model called organoids, as well as mouse models, the team showed that a molecule called a ‘PROTAC’ was able to help bowel cancer cells respond properly to chemotherapy again.
This crucial breakthrough suggests that PROTAC technology could be a powerful way to overcome treatment resistance.
It is early days, but this cutting-edge research will hopefully lead the way to personalised treatments for bowel cancer. By understanding the epigenetic factors involved in any particular cancer, we could give patients the treatment that would work best for them.
This would help stop the problem of cancers becoming resistant to drugs and improve survival rates. For patients this would mean more precious time with loved ones.
Join our united effort to stop cancer.
There are so many different ways to support our search for new cures. Will you join the 90,000+ Curestarters who are already helping us get closer to a day when no life is cut short by cancer?