CU Cancer Center News and Stories

Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have discovered how to extract critical information about breast cancer tumors and disease progression by analyzing blood plasma rather than using more invasive tissue biopsies.

“This is simply a blood draw,” said the study’s senior co-author Peter Kabos, MD, associate professor of medicine in the medical oncology division at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and CU Cancer Center member. “This allows us to look under the surface to see the defining characteristics of the disease. The advantage is that we don’t need to do repeated tissue biopsies.”

David Kelly | August 25, 2022

The chemotherapy drug irinotecan creates DNA damage leading to cell death and is used to treat colorectal cancer, among other cancer types. Now a University of Colorado Cancer Center study presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2019 suggests a way to make irinotecan work even better: When researchers added the experimental drug AZD0156 to irinotecan, colorectal cancer cells and models of human colorectal cancer tumors grown in mice both showed significantly more cancer cell inhibition than with irinotecan used alone. An ongoing phase 1 clinical trial is currently testing the combination against advanced solid tumors (NCT02588105).

Cancer Center | April 03, 2019