Prof Matt Seymour

Professor Matt Seymour

School of Medicine
University of Leeds
Leeds

Testing new treatments for bowel cancer

Matt Seymour is Professor of Gastrointestinal Cancer Medicine at the University of Leeds. His team carry out clinical trials testing new treatments for bowel cancer and cancers of other parts of the digestive system including the stomach and pancreas. Professor Seymour is especially interested in developing treatments with fewer side effects to give patients the best possible quality of life. He is also working to develop tests to select the best treatments for individual patients.

The FOCUS Trials

Professor Seymour's team have recently completed two large clinical trials involving nearly 2,600 people with bowel cancer. These trials have provided important information about how best to use chemotherapy to treat this disease. For example, it is possible to reduce the side effects of treatment by giving several drugs one after the other rather than all at the same time.

One of these trials, FOCUS-2, looked specifically at the issues facing patients who are too frail or elderly to receive the full chemotherapy dose and and the results are helping doctors to choose gentler treatments for these people. The team have now started a similar trial for elderly patients with advanced cancer of the gullet or stomach.

The PICCOLO Trial

PICCOLO is investigating new combinations of chemotherapy in patients whose bowel cancer has become resistant to the first course of treatment. At this time, patients are often then treated with a drug called irinotecan. The researchers are looking at ways to improve irinotecan treatment by combining it with other drugs.

One of these drugs is panitumumab, an antibody that sticks to proteins on the surface of cancer cells to stop them growing. Researchers anticipate that adding panitumunab to irinotecan will make it more effective. This trial is currently recruiting patients from around the UK and aims to include 1,260 participants by 2010.

Visit MyProjects to watch videos about the PICCOLO trial and to donate directly to this project.

The FOXTROT Trial

Many patients with bowel cancer can be successfully treated by surgery followed by a course of chemotherapy. Professor Seymour is leading a new trial, FOXTROT, investigating whether giving part of the chemotherapy before surgery improves the outcome for even more people with bowel cancer.

Personalising cancer treatments

With some forms of cancer, doctors can perform special 'molecular' tests on a sample of the patient's tumour to help select which drug is likely to be most effective for them. Professor Seymour's team are working to develop these tests for people with bowel cancer. Many thousands of patients in trials like FOCUS and PICCOLO have consented for some of their cancer tissue to be sent to the laboratory for further analysis. Information from these samples is being used to develop molecular tests that will help doctors select the most effective drugs for each patient.

To take these studies forward, the team are now working with researchers in Cardiff and London to launch a new trial called FOCUS-3. In this trial, patients with bowel cancer will have molecular tests before they are given treatment to discover whether this approach allows doctors to give more effective treatments with fewer side effects.

Professor Seymour's work into bowel cancer will hopefully lead to many improvements in treatments for this common form of the disease.

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