Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

All the blood cells in our body are produced by special cells in our bone marrow called hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). As we age, the DNA in our HSCs can become mutated in a way that could potentially lead to blood cancer, causing these cells to produce more blood cells than normal – we call this condition clonal hematopoiesis (CH). It is estimated that 10-20% of people over 70 have CH, but most of them will not go on to develop blood cancer. Despite this, these people still are at a higher risk of other diseases like heart disease. This is because our immune (white blood) cells are also affected by the mutations that cause CH, leading them to produce more disease-causing inflammation. Researchers are still unsure what the effects of CH are in other cancers. Some studies have shown that CH is linked with an increased risk of a patient’s cancer progressing, while other have shown that the mutations that cause CH can help your immune system fight cancer and that CH can help protect people from certain cancers, namely metastatic (stage 4) colon cancer. To help understand this better, our study will explore the relationship between CH and solid cancers. We are hoping to figure out how common CH is in people with different cancer types and stages, and if CH can help predict how patients will fare during their treatment. To do this, we will be using specialized computer programs that can scan genetic information from the blood of thousands of cancer patients to find CH. We will use clinical data from these patients alongside the CH information to answer our research questions. We then plan to use our lab mice that have CH and patient samples donated to research to find out why this is happening so that we can learn how to best care for people with CH and cancer.