? PILOT RESEARCH PROJECT 1 (P1) Two SUNY medical campuses (SUNY Stony Brook and SUNY Downstate) serving underrepresented minority communities with cancer health disparities are partnering with the NCI designated Cancer Center at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories (CSHL) to evaluate biological and genetic differences in colorectal cancers that may link to differences in cancer incidence and outcome observed in racial and ethnic minorities. We plan to develop a SUNY Downstate GI BioBank that will greatly augment the representation of underrepresented minorities in the collection of biospecimens that will use the same standard operating procedures currently in place at the SUNY Stony Brook GI BioBank. Furthermore the clinical metadata elements collected at SUNY Downstate will be the same and utilize a common controlled vocabulary that is used by the SUNY Stony Brook GI BioBank. To increase community participatory research among racial and ethnic minority populations, we plan to leverage the resources and expertise of the SUNY Downstate Brooklyn Health Disparities Center (led by Dr. Moro Salifu) in developing community education and outreach programs in underserved communities with a high proportion of racial and ethnic minorities (>70% African Americans). In P1, we propose to generate genomic and epigenetic profiling data of colon cancers using the NCI supported CSHL Shared DNA Resource Core directed by Dr. Dick McCombie (CSHL contact PI for P1) Generating the sequencing data will provide immediate feedback to the Downstate GI BioBank with respect to monitoring Q/A for their collection efforts. This genomic and epigenomic data will be linkable to parallel microarray and RNA-Seq data generated on the same coded deidentified samples by Dr. Jennie Williams (SUNY contact PI for P1). We anticipate that making the linked datasets available on the integrated biomedical informatics platform being developed by this proposed P20 project will facilitate sharing of these extremely valuable datasets with the larger cancer research community.
In the US, individuals of African descent are at higher risk for developing GI cancers (colorectal and pancreatic) and also exhibit higher mortality rates for these cancers compared to individuals of Caucasian descent. This grant will serve to build an integrative partnership between two SUNY medical campuses, Stony Brook and Downstate, and the NCI-designated Cancer Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories to study racial and ethnic differences in GI cancer biology. Along with community education and outreach programs, this partnership will improve our ability to collect the under-represented minority (URM) biospecimens that are critical for research addressing the disparity of URM populations and GI cancers. By integrating the education and training resources of these three institutions, we will increase the recruitment of students and investigators from cancer health disparity populations for training in translational research and emerging technologies.
