March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month: Support Cancer Clinical Trials Today!

By Admin at 3 Mar 2016, 10:57 AM

The third most common type of cancer among both men and women in the United States, and the second most deadly, colorectal cancer is most often found in people age 50 and older and impacts people in all racial and ethnic groups. Thanks to screening tests, death and incidence rates among men and women have been on the decline. However, according to the American Cancer Society, colorectal cancer is expected to cause nearly 50,000 deaths during 2016 alone.

Phase I and Phase II human clinical trials offer the best hope for finding new breakthrough cancer cures, yet they are among the most underfunded. Please take a moment to discover how a Gateway-funded clinical trial is saving lives of patients with colorectal cancer right now!

Meet Lee Thompson: Colorectal Cancer Survivor

When Lee Thompson first learned he had colorectal cancer, it was a shock, but he had a feeling that his battle with cancer was going to change his life — not end it. He was right.

For Thompson, participation in a Gateway-funded clinical trial led by Dr. Edward Lin was indeed life-changing. He responded well to the trial’s novel combination drug therapy for advanced stage colorectal cancer and is now in clinical remission!

With funding from Gateway, Dr. Lin is leading a phase II clinical trial that restores hope – and life – for individuals with advanced stage colorectal cancer.

When diagnosed as advanced metastatic disease, colorectal cancer is traditionally associated with a poor prognosis, with 5-year survival rates in the range of 5 to 8 percent.

In contrast, about 40 percent of Dr. Lin’s patients have achieved complete or near complete responses, with little or no detectable presence of cancer. Even more encouraging is that Dr Lin’s therapy has extended patients’ lives to a median survival of 92.7 months, all while avoiding the traditional and more toxic regimen of intravenous chemotherapy. Hear more about this groundbreaking trial in the video below.

Together, We Can Shape a World in Which a Cancer Diagnosis is No Longer Feared!

There's still time to help more patients like Lee Thompson. Your support helps Gateway to expand its commitments to patients and doctors by increasing our investments in transformational cancer research. Thanks to our compassionate and generous supporters, Gateway can continue to fund meaningful and breakthrough clinical trials worldwide that help people living with cancer to feel better, live longer and conquer cancer TODAY!