$7.5 Million NCI Grant for Colon Cancer Screening

Lurie Cancer Center member Vadim Backman, PhD, who has developed optical technology shown to be effective for the early detection of colon cancer has received a $7.5 million grant over five years from the National Cancer Institute to further study an instrument that potentially could become a routine colon cancer screening test and to launch large-scale clinical trials.

Colon cancer, the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States, can be easily treated if detected early. But no existing population-wide screening test can accurately predict the presence of the disease with adequate sensitivity. Backman, principal investigator for the grant and professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, believes the technology he has developed could lead to the first such test. A major part of the NCI grant is to validate the technology being developed for an inexpensive, non-invasive test for routine colon cancer screening, and have it ready for use.

In the future, it is possible that the simple test would be conducted by a primary care physician during an annual exam. Only patients with abnormal results would go on to have the more invasive and expensive colonoscopy.

The clinical trials will include two studies. The first study of 1,000 patients will be to finalize the technology to be used in the test (making sure it can be used clinically and is practical) and to define the technology's prediction rules; the second will be a double-blind study of 3,000 patients. The screening test, which does not require bowel preparation, will be done in patients about a week before a colonoscopy. Each person will have a colonoscopy even if the results from the screening test are negative in order to correlate the screening results with the colonoscopy results. "Our hope is that similar to how the routine pap smear drastically reduced deaths from cervical cancer, this new technology could do the same when it comes to colon cancer," said Backman.

Backman's optical technique takes advantage of certain light scattering effects and is minimally invasive. The method can detect abnormal changes in cells lining the colon long before those changes can be seen under a microscope, and even before polyps form.

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