Every penny of the funds raised by UCI Anti-Cancer Challenge participants are directed towards advancing innovative basic, translational and clinical cancer research that will lead to the next breakthroughs in cancer treatment at the UCI Health Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.
As the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in Orange County and the only one ranked among the nation's top 50 by U.S. News & World Report, the UCI Health Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center treats more patients with cancer — and more complex cases — than any other healthcare provider in its region.
Through a partnership with Children's Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), a portion of participant-raised funds are dedicated to pediatric cancer research.
TRANSFORMATIVE IMPACT: SUCCESS STORIES
A novel approach to advanced stomach cancer Determined to improve treatment options for patients with late-stage gastric cancer, UCI Health oncologists Maheswari Senthil, MD, and Farshid Dayyani, MD, PhD, have joined forces to develop a novel clinical trial. Together, they have launched STOPGAP, an innovative phase 2 clinical trial that takes a three-pronged approach to treating gastric carcinomatosis. It is supported in part by seed money from the UCI Anti-Cancer Challenge.
“We’ve made a new chemical that’s never been made before. We show how the drug works. And we show that the drug slows cancer growth,” says UCI Health’s Dr. Anand Ganesan. “That would not be possible without grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the UCI Anti-Cancer Challenge,” he says, which helped pave the way for his decade-plus research effort to identify genes that are activated in cancer and to develop ways to prevent those genes from sending signals that spur the disease.
