Grant: Operating Grant: Priority Announcement (IHSPR)

Lymphoma is cancer of the lymphatic system, accounting for about five percent of all cases of cancer. In July 2008, the president of the Canadian Association of Pathologists appealed for help in solving quality problems that result in inconsistent cancer-test results. A key pillar of the association's action plan is the participation in stringent quality-assurance programs. To address this call we have developed a clinical bioinformatics pipeline for the automated analysis of flow cytometry (FCM) data. This pipeline not only performs automated analysis of the FCM data, but also facilitates disease diagnosis and biomarker discovery. As proof of concept, we have investigated its utility for the automated identification of lymphoma sub-types, and used it to identify a prognostic cell population that we now aim to validate. We have formed a collaborative group involving cancer care centres across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Saudia Arabia that have access to existing FCM and clinical data, compiled as part of ongoing or completed lymphoma clinical studies. In this study, we will re-analyze this expanded data set using our novel bioinformatics approach to develop an accurate automated classifier that replicates the manual gating and analysis steps. Our study aims to not only aid clinicians in quality assurance related to lymphoma sub-type diagnosis, but to also identify additional lymphoma sub-types and potential biomarkers.