Congratulations to Dr Roslyn Kemp, who has been awarded a $39,407 Genesis Oncology Grant for her project entitled Improved survival with cimetidine in early colorectal cancer: impact on the Immunoscore.
The Genesis Oncology Trust support New Zealand-based initiatives that will lead to improvements in the prevention, detection, diagnosis or treatment of cancer, or improvements in palliative care.
Bowel cancer is very common in NZ but cimetidine, a drug originally used to reduce stomach acid, appears to reduce the risk of bowel cancer recurrence and death. We want to look at how cimetidine improves the immune response to cancer and whether this could be a major part of how it improves outcomes. We will do this using a new test, the Immunoscore, which measures specific types of immune cells and their location within the cancer and strongly predicts patient outcomes. The study will see if patients who took cimetidine around their cancer operation have better Immunoscores than those who did.
