Every penny of the funds raised by UC Irvine 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.
UCI Health Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center is a national leader in cancer research, education and treatment. Established in 1989 as Orange County’s first cancer center and designated as NCI “comprehensive” since 1994, the cancer center meets rigorous criteria aimed at providing world-class patient care and innovative research to Orange County, the second most densely populated county in California.
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 UC Irvine 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 UC Irvine 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.
