Project Leaders: 
Richard Moore and Robert Holt  

Lead Institutions: 
BC Cancer Agency and Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre 
 
Research Funding Program:  
SOF 3

Understanding how infectious agents are involved in cancer may lead to new prevention and treatment strategies. 

Multiple factors can contribute to the development of cancer including lifestyle choices, diet, environment and family history. Surprisingly, more than 20% of cancer cases worldwide are associated with infectious agents including viruses and bacteria. While some of these infectious agents such as human papillomavirus or the bacteria Helicobacter pylori, are already known, there are likely more infectious cancer-causing agents yet to be discovered.

Drs. Richard Moore and Robert Holt from the BC Cancer Agency will try to identify both known and unknown infectious agents that may be associated with cancer. For this research project, they are focusing on colorectal cancer (CRC) because of the availability of early stage tissues (polyps from colonoscopies) and because there are suspected associations between CRC and infectious agents. In Canada CRC is the fourth most prevalent cancer after prostate, lung and breast, but the second leading cause of cancer death (Canadian Cancer Society – www.cancer.ca, May 19, 2010).   

For this project, researchers will be extracting genetic material from both colorectal polyps (which are precursors to colorectal carcinomas) and from non-cancerous tissue removed with the polyps. This genetic material will be used to create a molecular "library" which has a record of every single genetic fragment that is active in the tumour. By comparing the libraries from the tumour and non-tumour tissues, they hope to find some genetic fragments that are present in the CRC tumours, but not the regular tissue, and then determine if these genetic fragments  actually belong to infectious agents. As part of their data analysis strategy, researchers will see if these foreign fragments match those of known infectious agents or if they indicate past evidence of an infection in the tumours.

Drs. Holt and Moore hope to successfully identify infectious agents in the colorectal cancer samples. Although this will be a promising first step, further testing and much additional work will be required before this information can be used to enable cancer control by vaccination or anti-microbial agents. If this approach is successful, the search for infectious agents will be expanded to other cancers that are suspected to be caused by infectious agents including breast, prostate, lung, brain and blood cancers. Other diseases will also be studied, in particular autoimmune diseases including multiple sclerosis and irritable bowel disease.