Colon cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the western world.
Most colon cancers are sporadic in nature and often associated with diet, tobacco and alcohol cosumption, however, other genetic and pre-existing bowel syndromes may increase risk.
A number of putative oncogenes and signaling pathways are dysregulated in colon cancer.
These include p53 and KRAS as examples and aberrant signaling activity of pathways such as WNT, NOTCH, BMP, Hedgehog and the proteins involved in mismatch repair.
Treatment for colon cancer involves surgery and chemotherapy and its success depends, in part, on the stage of the disease.
Current efforts have focused on understanding the molecular basis for colon cancer carcinogenesis so that individualized treatments may be designed and utilized more effectively.
However, resistance to these new targeted agents as well as cytotoxic chemotherapy remains a problem in treatment outcome.
Drug resistance mechanisms can enable colorectal cancer cells to survive treament with fluorpyrimidines, irinotecan, oxaliplatin, bevacizumab and other commonly used drugs.
The Human Colon Cancer Libraries I and II provide primer sets to generate PCR Arrays to analyze putative colon cancer biomarkers, genes involved in colon cancer carcinogenesis (HCCP-I) and genes that are associated with the drugs used in treatment of this disease (HCCP-II).