Ulcerative Colitis

"People with these inflammatory disorders face up to 20 times the risk of going on to develop cancer," says principal investigator John D.

Potter, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Cancer Prevention Research Program in the Hutchinson Center's Division of Public Health Sciences.

"One of the reasons we have chosen to study these two cancers is because they are major public health problems; colorectal cancer because of its very high incidence and its relative preventibility, pancreas cancer because of its very high death rate," says Potter, also a professor of epidemiology at the UW.

Indeed, some 150,000 new cases of colorectal cancer are diagnosed annually in the United States, where it is the third most common type of cancer in men and women.

Pancreatic cancer, while less common, is almost uniformly fatal; the survival rate is about 5 percent, and most people die within four months of diagnosis.

Understanding what causes the progression of these inflammatory diseases to malignancy will be critical to designing effective strategies to prevent or delay the onset of these cancers.

This knowledge also could lead to the development of screening tests for pancreatic cancer (currently there are none) and more sensitive, les...

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