Doctors and scientists at the Duke Gastrointestinal Cancers Program are at the forefront of the quest to develop new treatments and cures for GI cancers and side effects of treatment. For example:

• Clinical trial coordinators work with the team to provide access to clinical trials for patients who qualify. Clinical trials can offer innovative treatments not yet available on the market.
• Duke was the lead center for a national clinical trial for an experimental drug called bevacizumab (trade name Avastin), the first "anti-angiogenesis" drug to prove that it can shrink tumors and extend survival in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer. Patients who received bevacizumab along with standard chemotherapy survived longer than patients who received standard chemotherapy alone. Avastin has been approved by the FDA and is now considered the standard of care treatment for first-line colon cancer.
• Duke offers the only intra-operative radiation facility of its kind in the Southeast, allowing the team to deliver a highly specialized form of radiation directly to the tumor in the operating room without interfering with sensitive organs.
• Duke physicians are leading the way in defining the role of pre-operative chemotherapy and radiation treatment to shrink tumors of the esophagus, stomach, pancreas, and rectum before surgery.
• Duke abdominal imagers have pioneered a newer, less invasive screening method called "virtual colonoscopy," which uses a computerized tomography scanner to look at the colon, rather than a scope.
• Duke has the Phase I Program that focuses on very new experimental therapies for patients where standard treatments have stopped working. These are drugs that have shown promise in the laboratory and are only in their first phases of being in patients. Duke is one of only 16 NCI centers of excellence for phase I trials in the United States.
• Duke physicians have been leaders in developing procedures such as laparoscopic surgery for colon cancer, embolization of liver masses, and radiosurgery of liver tumors.
• Investigators at Duke are developing dendritic cell-based vaccines for pancreatic and colorectal cancers. Dendritic cells are immune cells that activate the body’s immune system to fight cancerous cells.
• Duke researchers have identified a protein called periostin that enables colon cancer to flourish and thrive once it has spread or metastasized to the liver. This protein could be a potential target for blocking the growth of metastatic colon cancers.