About

This website is dedicated to the Siempre Carolina Foundation, a non profit organization founded to help the Massachusetts General Cancer Center Fund in memory of Carolina Haggarty. We want to help advance research in cancer treatments so others don't have to live through what Carolina and our family had to endure. This foundation will help celebrate Carolina's life while helping raise awareness and hope for a better tomorrow. Massachusetts General Hospital Center is a leader in cancer research and is on the leading edge of targeted cancer therapy.

The Translational Research Program in the Tucker Gosnell Center for Gastrointestinal Cancers seeks to efficiently integrate cutting-edge laboratory and clinical research efforts to expedite transformative advances in our ability to deliver personalized cancer medicine approaches to our patients. Led by Ryan Corcoran, MD, PhD and Theodore Hong, MD, the program focuses on developing new and effective therapies for gastrointestinal cancers. 

 Over the past decade, targeted therapies – drugs targeting specific gene mutations and pathways that are responsible for the survival of a cancer – have revolutionized the treatment of cancer. We have seen incredible responses and lives extended in patients where standard treatments had failed. However, in many patients, these responses are temporary, as the cancer acquires resistance to the therapy by finding a new pathway to exploit. The goal of the Translational Research group is to develop promising therapeutic strategies that can be evaluated in clinical trials for patients whose cancers are driven by specific mutations.

In addition, Drs. Corcoran and Hong are looking at circulating tumor DNA – DNA fragments shed into the bloodstream from tumor cells throughout the body – to help guide treatment and monitor response to targeted therapies, and to track and study the evolution of drug resistance in patients in real-time.