Скачать или смотреть Dr. Benjamin Weinberg's GI Cancer Research Interests

Dr. Benjamin Weinberg shares his GI Cancer research interests. He discusses his research on new therapies for patients with colorectal and pancreatic cancers, young-onset colorectal cancer, and the microbiome.

Transcript:

I'm passionate about looking for new therapies for patients with colorectal and pancreatic cancer. What we hope to do is take early phase trials in animal models before it gets to the clinic and be able to make clinical trials for patients using new therapies we think hold promise and try to translate that bench research done by our basic science colleagues into new potential options for our patients. And what that entails are early clinical trials where we look at what the right dose of the medicine is, is the medicine hitting its target in the cancer cell? And then once we get more information, leveraging that information into larger clinical trials where we can look and see are these new therapies really effective for our patients?

I'm also very interested in young-onset colorectal cancer. There's been a dramatic rise in the incidents of early in life colon cancer and rectal cancer diagnosed before age 50, just in the last 20, 30 years since about the mid 1990s. And we really don't know why this is happening, and it's quite striking in our clinic, a disease of colorectal cancer, which still traditionally strikes mostly older adults. We see more and more individuals under age 50 diagnosed with this disease. And while many attribute this to the co-occurring epidemics of diabetes and obesity, we have many patients who are neither obese nor diabetic, who live very healthy fit lifestyles, and yet come to us with sometimes fairly advanced colorectal cancer. So one of our areas in research is to look at something called the microbiome to try to see, is there some difference in the bacteria that reside in tumors diagnosed in folks before age 50 or after age 65? And to see, is there some difference in this bacteria? Is there some change in the microbiome we're seeing in this young-onset colorectal cancer group and could that lead to different therapies, early screening technologies? And to also just fundamentally answer the question as to why this is happening.