Charlems Alvarez Jimenez, a postdoctoral scholar at Case Western Reserve University, was recently selected for the PhRMA Foundation’s 2024 Postdoctoral Fellowship Award in Translational Medicine. This prestigious award will support Alvarez Jimenez’s research in rectal cancer.
Approximately 40,000 patients are diagnosed with rectal cancer annually and receive neoadjuvant therapy to reduce tumor burden, followed by surgical excision of the rectum. Although up to 27% achieve pathologic complete response on the post-surgical specimen, they are still subjected to an invasive surgical procedure that is associated with quality-of-life issues.
There are no reliable or accurate clinically established markers indicative of treatment response in rectal cancer beyond histological findings on surgically excised rectal specimens.
Through the Fellowship Award, Alvarez Jimenez’s research will focus on developing a novel radiopathomic signature which will integrate computational analysis of digitized biopsy images together with quantitative characterization of corresponding MRI scans, toward capturing, integrating, and predicting treatment response in patients diagnosed with rectal cancers. This research will be clinically translated in the future to support diagnostic decision-making processes and inform precision medicine in rectal cancers.