Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second leading cause of cancer death in the western world.Ideally, CRC will be detected early because treatments become progressively morecomplicated, toxic and expensive in later disease stages, and the survival is best in earlystage of disease. That is the basis of screening. Currently, the gold standard screening test iscolonoscopy, which is invasive, expensive and difficult to perform on large populations. Onestrategy is to enrich the subgroup that requires a colonoscopy by doing a stool test (called afecal immunohistochemical test, FIT). The problem is that compliance for stool tests is lessthan 40% because testing stool is objectionable and inconvenient. We have developed ablood test based on the chemical composition of serum. This test is quite sensitive and it hasalready been tested on over 600 patients. In this project, in collaboration with Med-LifeDiscoveries and Innovate Calgary, as well as a multidisciplinary science team, we will furtherrefine the test, then create a diagnostic test that can be used in a typical clinical laboratory.Software will be developed to enhance the capability to analyze test results. Finally, we willtest the new diagnostic test on blood samples collected from close to 3500 individuals whohad screening colonoscopies. At the end, we will have a convenient, clinically applicable testthat will be tested in the future in a larger clinical trial that would inform regulatory agenciesand clinicians on the value of this new test as an alternative screening tool.