CA17118 - Identifying Biomarkers Through Translational Research for Prevention and Stratification of Colorectal Cancer (TRANSCOLONCAN)

This Action aims at using innovative translational research to identify colorectal cancer biomarkers for personalized medicine that will improve screening, early detection and disease follow-up, and attain better tumor profiling, state-of-the-art functional characterization of genetic variants and new therapy approaches. It will be organized in the following working groups:

– Disease risk profiling applied to the optimization of current screening programs. Germline predisposition variants, environmental factors, epigenetics, microbiome and metabolomics biomarkers will be used to better select patients eligible to be screened.

– Non-invasive biomarkers for early detection and disease follow-up. Circulating tumor cells, circulating tumor nucleic acids, tumor-educated platelets and exosomes will be explored in order to identify new tools for early detection and monitoring of the disease.

– Tumor profiling to identify biomarkers with prognostics and predictive value for patient stratification. Intra-tumor heterogeneity will be considered and tumor mutational profiling, epigenetics, single-cell genomics sequencing used as instruments to better inform tumor and precursor lesion characterization.

– Functional genomics and new therapies. Candidate genetic variants will be validated and routes to novel therapies for this disease will be conceived. To do so, cutting-edge approaches such as CRISPR-Cas9 and immunotherapy will be applied.

The network will bring together participants from different COST countries and will facilitate the research interaction and collaboration between research groups and enterprises interested in the described objectives. Diverse expertise includes clinical practice, germline and somatic genetics, epigenetics, bioinformatics, cell and molecular biology, microbiology, immunology, biostatistics, epidemiology, health economy and the industrial sector.