Project Title: Deciphering (epi)genetics interplay in colorectal cancer
Project Duration: 2023-2025
MOHCCN Consortium: Atlantic Cancer Consortium (ACC)
Investigators: Touati Benoukraf (lead), Sevtap Savas (lead), Darren O’Rielly (collaborator), John Thoms,
MD (collaborator); Angela Hyde, MD, PhD (collaborator).
Partners:
In this project, we focus on colorectal cancer. Our primary interest is to generate and utilize omics data obtained from patient biospecimen and conduct data analyses.
Our goals are to:
We will examine the gold cohort data produced by the Atlantic Cohort Consortium (n=260). This project will take advantage of the logistics put in place during the phase 1 project, where connections between Biobank, sequencing facility, bioinformatics core and IT infrastructure were set.
Although numerous studies have identified several variants useful for colorectal cancer diagnostic and therapeutical strategies, these variants fall, for the most part, within coding genes, which represent only 2% of the entire genome. Here, we aim to explore genomic and epigenomic aberrations in the non-coding genome, with a focus on regulatory elements, known to be more tissue/cell-specific than genes. For this purpose, we will perform H3k27ac ChIPSeq to map active non-coding regions and integrate it with other omics data to be generated from the patients. We also aim to explore the relationship between the molecular variables and patient / disease features (such as, age of diagnosis, tumor histology).
Key deliverables expected are: