Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Cancer and cardiovascular disease (CVD) are on the rise with the vast majority of disease occurring in low and middle income countries. Personalized medicine is emerging as a valuable approach to diagnose cancer and CVD at early stages when treatments are more likely to be associated with improved health outcomes. However, the vast majority of personalized medicine approaches are developed on a subset of the population and have limited utility in different ethnic groups and environmental contexts. Further, tools which do exist are impractical to implement in developing contexts. To address this, I will develop a non-invasive liquid biopsy-based approach to detect likelihood of progression to hematological cancers and CVD across a range of ethnic groups and environmental contexts using blood collected years prior to the diagnosis of disease. This work builds off recent studies which have linked the age-related mutation accumulation in blood to both diseases. While common in the healthy aging population, these mutations have been associated with subsequent cancer and CVD development. There is a clear need to understand the biology and develop biomarkers and tools that can distinguish benign and malignant patterns of mutation accumulation. To do so, I will capture and characterize the early evolutionary profiles of the mature blood cell pool in order to uncover the events causing an individual to shift from healthy to disease state. Through improving our understanding of early disease evolution, we will enable earlier diagnoses and identify novel therapeutic targets to prevent progression to disease. This study combines state-of-the-art machine learning techniques with classic population genetics to trace the evolution of disease in the aging blood cell pool. Our models will allow for clinical implementation and will lay the foundation for preventative medicine approaches for cancer and CVD in both Canadian and African contexts and improve health outcomes globally.