Colorectal Cancer Alliance shared on LinkedIn:
“When the Colorectal Cancer Alliance funds research, we don’t just write a check and wish the team luck. We vet the idea, the people, and the plan, and then we stay close. Following each project through to its conclusion is part of our promise to you, our supporters.
A team at Johns Hopkins, led by Dr. Alexander Popel, has been developing an experimental drug designed to destroy colorectal cancer cells from the inside.
In the lab, it showed real promise. But it had a stubborn problem: when the team injected it straight into a tumor, the drug wouldn’t stay put. Much of it slipped back out along the needle’s path and drifted into healthy tissue. Not great.
Your support helped solve the problem.
Alliance funding let the team build and test new ways to hold the drug in place. They had promised to try two approaches.
They delivered three and landed on an elegant solution: a gel that flows like a liquid through the syringe, then sets the moment it reaches the tumor. The drug stays where it’s needed and releases slowly over time, instead of slipping away.
The work is still early. It’s all been in the lab. But the vision is what makes it exciting. For many people with rectal cancer, treatment can mean major surgery and lasting changes to everyday life.
This team hopes that injecting this gel in the weeks before surgery could shrink tumors enough to make some operable that weren’t before – or to make surgery less drastic. They’ve since formed a company, are preparing their findings for publication, and are working toward a first clinical trial.
None of that next chapter happens without the first one. And the first one happened because of you.
That’s the power of research funding: Every dollar you give is worth far more than 100 cents. It compounds. It accelerates the next project, the next results, the next scientific breakthrough.
Not every project will succeed – that’s the nature of science – but even the ones that fall short teach us something that makes the next one more promising.
Thank you for making work like this possible. It is, in the truest sense, an investment in a future free of this disease.
- Can a drug destroy colorectal cancer cells from the inside? Alliance-funded Johns Hopkins researchers are exploring how.
- The challenge: The drug showed promise in the lab, but it wouldn’t stay in the tumor.
- The innovation: An injectable gel – liquid in the syringe, gel inside the tumor.
- The impact: Your support keeps promising research moving forward.
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Personalizing Colorectal Cancer Care with ctDNA? Dr. Robert Lentz
