Standard treatment for patients with advanced (metastatic) colorectal cancer is now with the expensive chemotherapy drug bevacizumab (Bev). Bev is thought to work by inhibiting blood vessel growth; it enhances the effectiveness of chemotherapy but also can cause some side-effects such as thrombosis, bleeding, kidney disorders and heart failure. There are currently no markers for determining which patients might benefit. This project will establish whether we can identify groups of patients who do or do not benefit from the addition of Bev, so that those who do not benefit can be spared the risk of side-effects and the community can be spared the unnecessary expense. In addition we will measure several blood proteins associated with blood vessel function to determine their predictive capacity for treatment success.

Research Area 
Project type 
Project Grant
Year of funding 
2014