Dr. John Paul Shen Recipient of 2022 ASCO Conquer Cancer Foundation Career Development Award

Congratulations to Dr. John Paul Shen at MD Anderson for being a recipient of the 2022 ASCO Conquer Cancer Foundation Career Development Award (CDA). This CDA comes with a 3-year, $200,000 research grant focused on appendix cancer. The ACPMP Research Foundation is pleased to have previously provided Dr. Shen with a letter of support for this research and enthusiastically applauds ASCO’s selection of Dr. Shen and his appendix cancer research as one of this year’s recipients!

Project Title: Developing Appendix Cancer Specific Chemotherapy: A Molecular & Clinical Approach

Lay Abstract: Appendix cancer is a rare tumor, and because it is so rare very few clinical trials have ever been performed in appendix cancer. Traditionally, appendix cancer has been treated with chemotherapy as if it were the same as colon cancer, and in 2022 this is still accepted practice. However, new data in the last five years generated by our lab and others has shown convincingly that appendix tumors are very different than colon tumors. Given that appendix tumors are so different than colon tumors, we believe that practice of giving colon cancer chemotherapy to appendix cancer patients is outdated, and that developing chemotherapy specifically for appendix tumors will be a better approach for these patients. We will perform a clinical trial of the drug paclitaxel given directly into the peritoneal space, which is where appendix cancer spreads to. Taken as a whole, we are confident that the proposed research will ultimately lead to the development of one or more drugs that are effective for appendix cancer.