We are happy to announce that our CPoC study titled Pulsatile high dose Sunitinib as a specific drug for (a subset of) metastatic mesenchymal CRCs - is now finalized. The project is a collaboration between Oncode Investigator Jan Paul Medema (Amsterdam UMC) and clinician Henk Verheul (Radboud UMC) and provides preliminary results for the Sunrise Study, a larger clinical study within the Oncode-ZonMw Affordable Healthcare programme funded by ZonMw.

Sunitinib is a drug that has been used extensively for metastatic renal cell carcinoma and is considered to target VEGFR. In other metastatic cancer conditions, the efficacy of this drug is limited. But in laboratory settings the scientists observed that high doses of Sunitinib could effectively kill a wider range of cancer cells, including colorectal cell lines. This effect is because Sunitinib can target a wider range of kinases when used at higher concentrations.

Based on these results, a phase 1 clinical study was initiated to determine whether high doses could be achieved in patients by changing the administration from continuous low dose to intermittent high dose. The effects of this change in dosing was remarkable with 50% of the patients having benefit from therapy, while toxicity was relatively mild.

Further on, it was tested whether the patients responding had a specific subtype of cancer, with a focus on the patients with mesenchymal colorectal cancer as there is evidence to indicate that this subtype of colorectal cancer responds poorly to current therapies, such as cetuximab or 5-FU and oxaliplatin based therapy. The patients for which material was available were classified first, and the results showed that subtype differences may have an impact on the response to therapy with mesenchymal cancers showing the highest response rates.