A new study led by researchers at the University of Liège highlights the unexpected role of Stard7 in the development of intestinal cancers. Long seen as a transporter of some lipids to mitochondria, Stard7 now appears to be a key player in mitochondrial metabolism and tumour development in the intestine.

VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center and its NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP) affiliates played a vital role in a phase III clinical trial that has established a new therapeutic standard for patients with stage III colon cancer with deficient DNA mismatch repair (dMMR).

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University and University College Dublin will use newly awarded funding of €670,000 from Enterprise Ireland’s Commercialisation Fund to develop a breakthrough blood-based screening test for bowel cancer (colorectal cancer, CRC).

The team, working with clinicians at St. Vincent’s University Hospital, seeks to transform cancer outcomes by moving screening away from invasive or unpleasant methods to their simple, high-accuracy blood test, named “CASPDx CRC”.

The CASPDx team is now initiating the formal validation of their product. Patients are being recruited in all Bowel Screen Centres in the HSE Dublin & South East region as part of clinical validation studies, with assistance of the UCD Clinical Research Centre. While the CASPDx CRC test is still at clinical validation and immunoassay development phases, the team aim to launch the test and spin-out as a company by the end of 2027.

A new study from researchers at the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology (Alliance) shows that patients with stage III colon cancer with deficient deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) mismatch repair (dMMR) had significantly better outcomes when the immunotherapy drug atezolizumab (Tecentriq^®) was added to standard chemotherapy after surgery. The phase III Alliance ATOMIC A021502 trial, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and conducted in partnership with Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, and the German group Arbeitsgemeinschaft Internistische Onkologie (AIO), found that this approach lowered the risk of the cancer returning or causing death by 50%, with 86.3% of patients remaining disease-free at three years compared with 76.2% receiving chemotherapy alone. The findings, now published in The New England Journal of Medicine, provide strong evidence that adding immunotherapy to chemotherapy can improve clinical outcome for this group of patients and establishes a new therapeutic standard for this biologically distinct subset of colon cancer.