Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month

Joe Bullock finally heard the 3 little letters he’d been waiting to hear since his colorectal cancer diagnosis: NED. But he wasn’t expecting the uncertainty that shortly followed, feeling stuck in the in-between phase “after cancer.”

Six months before he was diagnosed with stage IIIB colorectal cancer, both of Joe Bullock’s parents passed away. Chemotherapy hit him hard and stirred a mixture of depression and feelings of inadequacy as a husband and father. Then he discovered the power of opening up.

New study results presented at the 2020 ASCO annual meeting suggest that there is a new standard of care for the first-line treatment of some patients with advanced colorectal cancer. This was the first study to compare the use of Keytruda (pembrolizumab), a PD-1 inhibitor, versus chemotherapy to see which is the best first treatment for patients with metastatic (spreading) colorectal cancer and microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) or mismatch repair-deficient (dMMR) abnormalities.