Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C), Exact Sciences, and Providence announced funding for a new Dream Team dedicated to addressing colorectal cancer disparities. The SU2C Colorectal Cancer Health Equity Dream Team will receive a total of $8 million—$6 million from Exact Sciences and $2 million from Providence.
The Stand Up To Cancer-selected Dream Team will consist of robust screening, research, education, and training efforts that will extend across the United States to establish three SU2C Zones: Greater Boston, Los Angeles, and Great Plains Tribal Communities in South Dakota. These zones, which will ideally operate long after the grant period is over, include diverse and distinct communities that are medically underserved and have particularly low screening rates for colorectal cancer.
The multi-disciplinary team selected by SU2C is led by Jennifer Haas, of Massachusetts General Hospital; Folasade P. May of the University of California, Los Angeles; and Anton Bilchik of Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Los Angeles. Additional team members are from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Great Plains Tribal Leaders Health Board.
Under the leadership of Haas and May, the team’s wide-ranging goals include: establishing and implementing comprehensive at-home stool-based colorectal cancer screening programs at community health centers to increase screening rates to 80% within the SU2C Zones; ensuring patients who have an abnormal stool-based screening test result receive a follow-up colonoscopy; building a collection of blood and stool samples for future research to ensure that low income and racial/ethnic minority populations are represented in the development of new screening tests and early detection methods for colorectal cancer; and fostering the careers of a new generation of Black, Latino, and American Indian doctors and researchers.
Additionally, under the leadership of Bilchik, Providence will design and deploy a community-based campaign to increase colorectal cancer screening rates in demographically diverse areas within Los Angeles County. Providence will recruit and deploy community health action teams (CHATs)—residents trained and supported to work as health promoters and care navigators within their own neighborhoods—to implement a locally designed and operated colorectal cancer screening campaign.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a dramatic drop in colorectal cancer screening,” Haas, the Peter L. Gross MD chair in primary care at Massachusetts General Hospital, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and professor of social and behavioral sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a statement. “While we’ve seen some colorectal cancer screening rates rebound more recently, overall the impact of COVID-19 on Black, Indigenous, and people of color is dire and compounds the low cancer screening rates and poorer cancer outcomes seen before the pandemic.”
A SU2C Colorectal Cancer Health Equity Community Engagement Grant program will roll out in the coming months to support and complement the Dream Team’s work. SU2C will provide three-year grants ranging from $5,000 – $25,000 to organizations within the SU2C Zones to develop new or implement existing community programs in colorectal cancer early detection and screening.
