Press Releases

Opioid painkillers are very effective when used to manage cancer-related pain, but they’re also highly addictive. Because abuse and misuse of this class of drugs is common, and because opioid overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in New York State, doctors who treat patients with cancer face unique challenges when prescribing pain relievers.

Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center scientists successfully competed for more than $36 million in grants from government agencies and private funders awarded in the second half of 2021 — including two prestigious “R01” Research Project awards from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for more than $3 million each.

Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center President and CEO Candace S. Johnson, PhD, has been named to City & State’s 2022 Health Care Power 100 list, released today. The weekly news magazine counts Dr. Johnson — who has been at the helm of Roswell Park since — as one of the “New York leaders who are saving lives.”

In 2012, Seneca Nation Businessman J.C. Seneca formed the JC Seneca Foundation (JCSF) with a mission to form partnerships that promote the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual well-being of Native people and their surrounding communities. Since then, Seneca has realized that mission by supporting charitable programs such as It Takes a Tribe, providing sponsorships for initiatives including Bikers Against Child Abuse and The Ride for Dialysis, and forming partnerships with community health organizations such as G-Health Enterprises and Harmonia Collaborative Care. As JCSF moves into its second decade, Seneca is taking steps to further his foundation’s impact.

Today, the Ride for Roswell, presented by the West Herr Automotive Group, launched registration for the 2022 event, which will take place on Saturday, June 25 at the University at Buffalo. Online registration is available at www.rideforroswell.org. 

Metastasis, or spread of a cancer tumor from one organ to another, is a complex process about which much is still unknown. A collaborative research team led by scientists from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center has determined that a small protein, RAC1, actively recruits enzymes involved in nucleotide production to promote cancer metastasis. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, suggest that targeting this interaction may provide a new strategy for treating advanced cancers.

A study led by scientists at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center shows that chemotherapy after surgery for gastric adenocarcinoma is significantly associated with longer survival in patients with chemosensitive disease, but not in those with very sensitive or refractory disease. These findings, which were recently published in the journal JAMA Network Open, suggest that assessing how responsive a tumor appears to be to treatment with chemotherapy before surgery can be used to guide decisions regarding postoperative chemotherapy, thereby personalizing treatment of patients with this type of stomach cancer.

African American men currently have the highest rates of prostate cancer in the United States and the poorest outcomes. New grants from the U.S. Department of Defense and American Cancer Society will fund work by two Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center teams focused on understanding and eliminating prostate cancer health disparities.

A multidisciplinary team led by Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center has identified troponin, a protein that enters the bloodstream only when the heart is damaged, as an early and reliable predictor of myocarditis in cancer patients receiving immunotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) drugs. Findings of this retrospective study, which have been published in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, suggest that weekly troponin monitoring during the first six weeks of treatment could help physicians detect this rare but potentially fatal side effect of cancer immunotherapy.