Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

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 more complicated, toxic and expensive in later disease stages, and the survival is best in early stage of disease. That is the basis of screening. Currently, the gold standard screening test is colonoscopy, which is invasive, expensive and difficult to perform on large populations. One strategy is to enrich the subgroup that requires a colonoscopy by doing a stool test (called a fecal immunohistochemical test, FIT). The problem is that compliance for stool tests is less than 40% because testing stool is objectionable and inconvenient. We have developed a blood test based on the chemical composition of serum. This test is quite sensitive and it has already been tested on over 600 patients. In this project, in collaboration with Med-Life Discoveries and Innovate Calgary, as well as a multidisciplinary science team, we will further refine 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 will test the new diagnostic test on blood samples collected from close to 3500 individuals who had screening colonoscopies. At the end, we will have a convenient, clinically applicable test that will be tested in the future in a larger clinical trial that would inform regulatory agencies and clinicians on the value of this new test as an alternative screening tool.