Connecting Alterations in Genome, Proteome and Metabolomics to Explore OSCC Pathogenesis and Translational Medicine Potential (I)

Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is one of cancers prominent in Taiwan. In addition to increasing incidence, the patient’s survival rate has not been improved even with more advance treatment modalities. Many biomarkers have been reported based either genetic variations or protein alterations that may help identify OSCC or stratification of patients for better and more efficient treatments. However, they are still far from clinical application. The failure of biomarkers for clinical usage is likely due to the heterogeneous nature of tumor, and limited numbers of clinical samples have been tested in individual studies for biomarker verification. In this integrated program project, we (Professor Yu-Sun Chang and a group of faculty members in Chang Gung University) aim to identify novel biomarkers for early detection, prognosis and treatment for OSCC by using the integrated omics technologies. In this 3-year project, we particularly intend to uncover the directionality of mutated DNA-RNA-protein in clinical samples by exome sequencing (to detect somatic muatations), RNAseq(to detect mutated transcripts) (Subproject II: Yu-Sun Chang/CM Bert Tan/Hsuan Liu), and quantitative Multiple Reaction Monitoring assay (MRM for detection of mutated peptides (Subproject III: Yi-Ting Chen/Jau-Song Yu) in same clinical tissue sample. Based on the results from the omic data, the Bioinformatic group (Subproject V: Petrus Tang/Po-Jung Huang) will built up the data analysis pipelines to connect the genomic and proteomic data, and to explore the pathways that may affect the tumor growth, tumor cell survival, as well as alterations in metabolism in cancer (Subproject IV: Chih-Ching Wu). The source of clinical samples will be managed by Professor Kai-Ping Chang (Subproject I), who is responsible for patient recruitment and sample collection. Clinical samples including blood and saliva samples from 300 OSCC patients and 300 healthy volunteers, as well as the remaining tissues of the 300 OSCC patients after surgery will be collected with informed consent. We foresee that we can establish the physiologically relevant pathogenesis of OSCC using tumor tissues, and from these analyses we can establish molecular biomarkers with strong potential for OSCC translational studies.

Project ID:PC10309-0063
External Project ID:MOST103-2632-B182-001