Manju George, Scientific Director at PALTOWN Development Foundation, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“I am not in Mississippi this week of March Colorectal Cancer Awareness month, because I’m in London attending the Cancer Grand Challenges 2026 Summit. Today 5 new funded teams were announced including the REWIRE CAN team, where I’m the Lead Patient Advocate. CGC projects are pretty unique in that each project has an active patient advocate team. We have a 3 member patient advocate team including a stage 4 CRC survivor, Vincent De Jong from the Netherlands.
This March, I feel honored and privileged to be part of the international REWIRE CAN team. You can read more about the project and the fantastic international team – world-renowned experts in the field of biochemistry, clinical oncology, drug development, computational biology and cancer biology- coming together to pool their combined expertise to tackle colorectal cancer.
As we all know, we have limited treatment options for metastatic colorectal cancer. This team is approaching CRC in a revolutionary new way, looking at cancer signaling as a target to modulate, not by inhibition, but by activation of specific signaling pathways, and to rewire cancer cells states so cells remain sensitive to treatment.
Unlike commonly used approaches where signaling nodes are turned off to inhibit cancer growth, this project looks to activate signaling so that cancer cells are “too activated” for their own comfort, as there is evidence that cancer cells like to keep signaling within certain critical “Goldilocks” limits.
The idea is that unlike compensatory signaling pathways which quickly get activated when signaling through specific nodes are inhibited, this approach of activating signaling will likely trigger stress pathways which will block proliferation. There are multiple approaches that will be taken to “rewire” tumor cells to a sensitive state and keep them there.
I am looking forward to these novel approaches and new insights on colorectal cancer biology that will be revealed, leading to new ways to exploit to control and eliminate cancer cells.
What’s personally exciting to me about this project is that it covers preclinical development all the way to getting compounds ready for testing in phase I/II clinical trials in patients.
My goal as part of this project is to make sure that the research stays centered on what’s valuable to patients and also to demystify the process of drug development for patients, caregivers and the public. It takes a ginormous amount of work to get from an idea to a compound that’s validated through extensive pre-clinical studies, ready to be tested in a human phase I trial.
Looking forward to everything that will be revealed in the next 5 years!!”
Read more about REWIRE CAN.
More posts featuring Manju George on OncoDaily.