The Know Your Biomarker Advocacy Toolkit was created to help advocates join the global effort to ensure all colorectal cancer patients have access to biomarker testing.
Know Your Biomarker
Know Your Biomarker is an awareness, education, and advocacy campaign advocating for global access to colorectal (bowel) cancer biomarker testing. Through the Know Your Biomarker program, the Global Colon Cancer Association advocates for biomarker testing for all colorectal cancer patients, because where you live should not determine whether you can prevent or survive colorectal cancer.
Know Your Biomarker advocates for biomarker testing access at all levels by working with individual advocates, non-profit organizations, industry partners, and policymakers. The Know Your Biomarker Advocacy Toolkit was created to help you join the global effort to ensure all colorectal cancer patients have access to biomarker testing.
Thanks for posting with us. Biomarker testing is definitely not an American effect. Our org advocates for the availability and access to biomarker testing for all cancer patients around the world, especially colon cancer patients. In fact, when I was diagnosed in 2012, it was not standard of care at my cancer center. It is now and it’s covered by many insurance companies due to the benefits it provides in a diagnosis and therapy determination.
In this age of personalized therapies, biomarkers can lead you to know what therapies will be the most beneficial, which ones to absolutely avoid that would be detrimental to your fight, and determine if there is a hereditary aspect which would lead to family members getting tested and determine possible surveillance testing to avoid or catch a cancer early in development when it’s most treatable.
I hope you are doing well because of your treatment. I hope you benefited from the chemo you received. Some cancers do respond well to that. Look at the attached chart of the biomarkers associated with colon cancer. These are the ones we know about today, but more will be discovered in the future. In my case, biomarker testing let me know I was MSI-h with dMMR (deficient mis-match repair) in the MLH1 gene. This means cancer can hide from my immune system. I had a hereditary aspect called Lynch Syndrome. I did over 2 years of chemo and then a clinical trial found I may benefit from an immunotherapy drug and it worked. My biomarkers were similar to those that were gaining benefit from this immuno drug, so we did the trial. I was on the trial for over 2 years. Knowing what we know now, chemo therapies are not effective for me. Today, those colon cancer patients with the same biomarkers I have (MSI-h) would not be given chemotherapy. Those with a different biomarker would not respond well to immuno therapies and thus should avoid them.
You do bring up a good point that not everyone given a cancer diagnosis will get biomarker testing. In this age of personalized medicine, they should be. Absolutely.
~Tom, GCCA Survivor - Colon Cancer Connected Site Administrator.
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