Medical oncology colorectal cancer group
Colorectal cancer, Organoids, Real world data
Research aim
To improve outcomes and quality of life for all patients with colorectal and anal cancer by developing and validating biomarkers, enhancing therapeutic strategies, refining patient selection, and studying real life treatment outcomes.
About us
Our research group integrates translational and clinical research to optimize the understanding of colorectal cancer biology to improve treatment and outcomes for our patients. We collaborate with many research groups within and outside the UMC Utrecht (Lab Translational Oncology, Center for Molecular Medicine), the Cancer Epidemiology group (Julius Center) and the image-guided therapy and theranostics groups. We lead the prospective nationwide colorectal cancer cohort (PLCRC) in which we aim to include each patient with colorectal, small bowel and anal cancer, to be able to learn from each patient. To date > 20.000 patients are included with consent to use data, tissue, blood and PROMs for research.
Our research covers a wide spectrum of topics and ranges from prognostic and predictive biomarkers (liquid biopsies, AI based biomarkers, radiomics, genomics and organoids) to understanding resistance and developing novel, targeted therapies through OMICs analyses and developing complex disease models (patient derived organoids) and translating these findings to the clinic by performing (early phase) clinical trials. We evaluate how patients are treated in real life, lifestyle, quality of life and how results from trials translate to the real world setting. We collaborate to accelerate the development of new oncology drugs by using data and patient derived material from our well defined PLCRC cohort in the Oncode Accelerator project where we lead the patient cohort platform.