Liquid Biopsy to Measure Novel Biomarkers of ImmunoMetabolic Cancer Risk (IMCR)

We propose to develop a blood test for the early detection of cancer. Our research team, and others, have shown a unique link between chronic cell injury, cholesterol, and cancer. These complex interactions have been hard to measure in the past. However, we have developed expertise that may enable us to easily measure a signal in certain blood cells that simplifies this biological complexity to a single measure. To demonstrate that our test works, we will obtain blood samples from individuals without cancer, isolate cells from the blood, and then measure our candidate marker. The same studies will be done on blood cells from individuals who have been diagnosed with a condition that increases their risk for blood cancer and on blood cells from individuals diagnosed with the blood cancer. We anticipate that our studies will reveal that the signal we are measuring will be the lowest in individuals who are healthy, will increase in individuals with the pre-cancer condition, and will be the highest in those who have been diagnosed with blood cancer. These findings would powerfully show how patients may benefit from our test for the early detection, and even prevention, of the blood cancer we are studying. Further, these results would enable us to initiate much larger studies to show that early detection of the rising signal in the blood should be generally studied for all cancers.