Colorectal cancer research emphasizes screening, immunotherapy for MSI-high tumors, and targeted therapies for specific mutations.
A registry-based analysis of 11,681 US interventional cancer trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov between 2008 and 2024 found that industry sponsors now outnumber federal sponsors nearly 5 to 1 (4.53-to-1 overall), with the ratio widening from 2.72-to-1 in 2008–2012 to 6.44-to-1 in 2019–2024.
The phase III STELLAR trial (NCT02533271) randomly assigned 591 patients with distal or middle-third locally advanced rectal cancer to a short-course radiotherapy-based total neoadjuvant therapy regimen (SCRT-TNT) or standard long-course chemoradiotherapy (CRT); this update reports 5-year outcomes at a median follow-up of 68.7 months.
Retrospective, single-center biomarker cohort study of 39 patients with dMMR metastatic colorectal cancer treated with anti-PD-1 monotherapy at Mayo Clinic, using integrated exome, transcriptome, and immune-repertoire profiling to test whether quantitative MSI burden — not just binary MSI-high status — predicts benefit from checkpoint blockade
Open-label, single-center phase I dose-escalation and dose-expansion trial of IM96, an autologous GUCY2C-targeted CAR T-cell product, in 20 treated patients with microsatellite-stable, third- or later-line metastatic colorectal cancer — a population with very few remaining options
Retrospective subset analysis of the CIRCULATE-Japan GALAXY registry (298 patients with resected colorectal liver metastases) testing whether ctDNA-defined molecular residual disease (MRD) status can identify who actually benefits from adjuvant chemotherapy (ACT) after liver resection