Grant: Team Grant: Bringing Biology to Cancer Prevention - General External Exposome

Lung cancer is the most prevalent cancer type in Canada today and, due to late diagnosis, also cancer-related death. While three in five lung cancers are still caused by tobacco smoking, up to 40% of cases are attributed to DNA-damaging environmental exposures unrelated to tobacco, including radioactive radon in housing and air pollutants such as combustion particulates generated by events such as wildfires or burning fuels. When thinking about improving lung cancer prevention, problems include the fact that awareness of lung cancer risk from breathing in radon and other combustion particulate air pollutants remains lower amongst the general population that it should be (given the number of cancers associated with them), while data on the costs of treating cancers caused by these exposures are out-of-date. Another issue is that, while emerging screening programs can diagnose lung cancers at earlier, more treatable stages, they cannot currently accept patients outside of a (heavy) tobacco smoking-centric framework due to insufficient tools needed to perform personalized risk assessment for non-tobacco lung cancer causes. Unless action is taken, people who experience lung cancer from one or more non-tobacco causes will remain ineligible for potentially life-saving early cancer detection. Our project integrates many different types of expertise to understand the extent to which we are all exposed to these increasingly prevalent environmental sources of lung cancer, and what effects they cause when we breathe them together. Importantly, we will investigate the effect that variations that exist between people and family lineages (genetic ancestry) has on how our bodies deal with damage to DNA from the type of these prevalent air pollutants. The knowledge we generate will be used to support new lung cancer screening criteria, assess the impact of reducing exposures on future healthcare costs, and promote health information-seeking behaviour through media communication.