Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Colorectal cancer among the most commonly diagnosed cancers in Canada. The overall survival for metastatic colorectal cancer is 13%. There are several factors that limit our ability to accurately predict prognosis of individuals with colorectal cancer. Therefore, studies are warranted to discover more reliable prognostic factors, to better improve patient outcome. Additionally, there is an urgent need to develop more effective therapeutics, specifically to target advanced disease. Our study focuses on characterizing the influences of the immune system on colorectal cancer and identifying markers that will better predict patient outcomes. We therefore looked at the composition of immune cells within colorectal cancer and normal colon and examined differences in between the two. We also identified types of immune cells that are important for determining patient outcomes and used this in combination with genetic analysis to develop an algorithm that predicts patient prognosis for colorectal cancer. It is our hope that this algorithm will be a powerful tool to effectively assess prognosis of colorectal cancer patients.