Our laboratory investigations focus on clinical studies to improve the response of tumors to drug therapies, and on animal studies to investigate methods to enhance drug delivery and decrease toxicity.
Colon cancer is one of the most common malignancies in the United States.
Of those cases that are resectable, one third will be cured by resection of metastases alone. Of those cases that are not resectable, systemic chemotherapy offers minimally palliation, and little change of improved survival or cure. The treatment is well tolerated with little systemic toxicity. To examine this unusual spread of disease and to elucidate the mechanism of tumor metastases formation, we have developed a rat model of colon cancer using a variety of cell lines, some of which spread preferentially to the lung, and others that spread only to the liver. We are currently involved in studying differences in the phenotypic and genotypic characteristics of the tumor cell lines that are derived from the same parent cell line to determine how cells choose their site of metastases.