Grant: Team Grant: Bringing Biology to Cancer Prevention - General Pool

The prognosis for stomach cancer is dire if caught at a late stage and better clinical treatments are needed. When the stomach lining is injured, it can become chronically inflamed and develop into pre-malignant lesions which may become cancerous. We are interested in studying these lesions because if we can heal these lesions or prevent them from becoming malignant, we would completely stop stomach cancer from developing. This would be a dramatic change in the way we manage stomach cancer with obvious advantages for the patient and health system. In this project, our team will assemble tissue samples of normal stomach, premalignant lesions, and the immune cells surrounding them from the same patient. We will use genetic methods to identify the biological processes and protein levels within each type of cell present in these samples. The data from the samples will be compared to build a map that shows how the biological processes change as normal tissue becomes pre-malignant and cancerous. We will also see how the immune cells in the surrounding tissue react to these changes. These in-depth data will help us find the biological processes and proteins that are responsible for making pre-malignant cells become malignant in the stomach. This information will also guide us in developing therapies to target these biological processes or proteins in the pre-malignant lesions and prevent them from becoming cancerous. The anticipated outcomes of this project are a clearer understanding of how the different types of cells in the stomach interact during the development of stomach cancer, and how we can prevent pre-malignant lesions in the stomach from becoming cancerous. For the patient, this would mean that doctors would actively treat pre-malignant lesions to prevent cancer from developing rather than treating the cancer itself.