Integration of pharmacology, molecular pathology, and population data science to support precision gastrointestinal oncology.

NPJ Precis Oncol
Authors
Abstract

Precision medicine has a goal of customizing disease prevention and treatment strategies. Under the precision medicine paradigm, each patient has unique pathologic processes resulting from cellular genomic, epigenomic, proteomic, and metabolomic alterations, which are influenced by pharmacological, environmental, microbial, dietary, and lifestyle factors. Hence, to realize the promise of precision medicine, multi-level research methods that can comprehensively analyze many of these variables are needed. In order to address this gap, the integrative field of molecular pathology and population data science (i.e., molecular pathological epidemiology) has been developed to enable such multi-level analyses, especially in gastrointestinal cancer research. Further integration of pharmacology can improve our understanding of drug effects, and inform decision-making of drug use at both the individual and population levels. Such integrative research demonstrated potential benefits of aspirin in colorectal carcinoma with mutations, providing the basis for new clinical trials. Evidence also suggests that (15-PDGH) expression levels in normal colon and the germline rs6983267 polymorphism that relates to tumor (β-catenin)/ signaling status may predict the efficacy of aspirin for cancer chemoprevention. As immune checkpoint blockade targeting the (PD-L1)/ (PD-1) pathway for microsatellite instability-high (or mismatch repair-deficient) metastatic gastrointestinal or other tumors has become standard of care, potential modifying effects of dietary, lifestyle, microbial, and environmental factors on immunotherapy need to be studied to further optimize treatment strategies. With its broad applicability, our integrative approach can provide insights into the interactive role of medications, exposures, and molecular pathology, and guide the development of precision medicine.

Year of Publication
2017
Journal
NPJ Precis Oncol
Volume
1
Date Published
2017
ISSN
2397-768X
DOI
10.1038/s41698-017-0042-x
PubMed ID
29552640
PubMed Central ID
PMC5856171
Links
Grant list
KL2 TR001100 / TR / NCATS NIH HHS / United States
R35 CA197735 / CA / NCI NIH HHS / United States
R01 CA138962 / CA / NCI NIH HHS / United States
R01 CA137178 / CA / NCI NIH HHS / United States
K24 DK098311 / DK / NIDDK NIH HHS / United States
K07 CA190673 / CA / NCI NIH HHS / United States