The Champalimaud Clinical Centre focuses on delivering integrated oncological care in an efficient way, on facilitating rapid responses that are adequate to the patients’ clinical status, and on the ceaseless search for the best results with the lowest costs. Focused on colon, rectal, oesophageal and stomach tumours, the unit works closely with the Primary and Secondary Liver, Bile Duct and Pancreas Cancer Group and in cooperation with radiologists, pathologists, geneticists, nuclear medicine experts, nurses, psycho-oncologists, nutritionists and palliative care specialists. Prevention and screening of digestive tumours through risk assessment and early cancer diagnosis is of crucial importance in our activity in this area – not only for individual people, but also for the families of patients who have been diagnosed with digestive cancer. This is done mainly through colonoscopy, and through access to the genetic diagnosis services for groups with hereditary risk.

The main targets of this multidisciplinary group of the Digestive Cancer Unit are colon and rectal cancers. At the CCC, we adopt a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach for the treatment of rectal cancer. This includes advanced forms of radiotherapy, specific rectal imaging techniques and high-precision surgical procedures. We use the most innovative rectal surgery techniques, which together with other treatment options, allow us to achieve high levels of efficacy, minimising the destruction of adjacent healthy tissue and improving patients’ quality of life. Though associated with colon cancer, rectal cancer has been progressively gaining relevance. At the CCC, rectal cancer specialists search, in a multidisciplinary way, for the best forms of treatment, while at the same time working with various scientists in order to develop innovative therapeutic options that can be better tolerated.

In 2014 the Digestive Cancer Unit established an international collaborative programme for the conservative (non-surgical) treatment of rectal cancer, and initiated a treatment and follow-up protocol for these patients. Through this innovative approach, which has been progressively used in various international centres, the Champalimaud Clinical Centre established itself as one of the leading European centres in this area. This recognition has been clearly evidenced through the International Watch and Wait Database, in which the Champalimaud Centre centralises an international registry of over 1,000 patients with rectum conservation following a neoadjuvant treatment based on chemo-radiotherapy.

Since 2015, interventional gastroenterology has been utilised at the CCC, with the collaboration of Professor Jacques Devière, of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Director of the Gastroenterology and Endoscopy Service at Erasmus Hospital). Thanks to his regular presence, the gastroenterology team of the CCC has been developing a diagnostic and endoscopic treatment programme that includes therapeutic techniques such as peroral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) for the treatment of oesophageal motor diseases, and combined approaches of endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) and endoscopy in oncologic pathologies of the bile ducts.