Immunotherapy for advanced cancers of the abdomen can be quite effective, but not all tumors are responsive to this type of treatment. There is intense interest in new methods to convert non-responsive tumors into responsive tumors. One such method is to inject chemical constituents of micro-organisms into tumors in order to stimulate the immune system to recognize the tumor as foreign and mount an immune response to treatment.~Provide a concise and brief, one-paragraph summary of your research project. Include a summary of the problem, the main objective and rationale of your project; a brief description of the experimental approach and methods; a concise description/summary of the most important results that you hope to obtain; and why think your results will be significant
The purpose of this research study is to determine whether a sterile bacteria wall chemical, called lipopolysaccharide (LPS), can be injected safely into abdominal tumors during routine laparoscopic surgery performed as a preliminary procedure in patients who will subsequently undergo a larger planned operation to remove abdominal tumors. The researchers will biopsy the tumor before injection and then again at the time of the larger operation to assess whether any effect of the treatment can be measured.