Identification of Novel Biomarkers and Cancer Genes in Hepatocellular Carcinoma Though Integrated Comparative Oncogenomic Approach

HCC is the seventh most common cancer worldwide and the third leading cause of cancer‐related death with an estimation of more than 700,000 new cases and deaths annually. Since HCC progression is usually asymptomatic resulted in poor prognosis and low 5‐year survival rate, more sensitive and specific biomarkers for diagnosis and tumor classification are still needed. Because of the high degree of genetic and biological similarity between the process of neoplastic development in human HCC and its rodent models, the rodent models has long proved to be extraordinarily useful in human cancer research. Previously, we have successfully identified putative cancer genes and HCC loci through integration of human differentially expressed genes and aberrant chromosome region syntenic to rodent quantitative trait loci. In this proposal, we plan to expend our previous work through integration of vast amount of public available transcriptom data of human HCC and its rodent models to discover putative cancer genes. The putative cancer genes discovered in the bioinformatic comparative oncogenomic approach will be test for the feasibility to serve as HCC biomarker using human HCC tissues. Also, the oncogenetic characteristic of the putative cancer genes will be studied to provide further understanding in hepatocarcinogenesis. The long‐term goals of the proposal are through the combination of bioinformatic and molecular biology approaches to discover biomarkers and cancer genes for HCC which are extremely important for the development of HCC prognosis markers and the study of HCC tumorigenesis. The major aims for the proposed proposal are: 1. To discover putative cancer genes for HCC through comparative oncogenomic approaches. 2. To test the efficacy of the putative cancer genes as potential biomarkers for HCC. 3. To explore the ongenetic characteristic of putative cancer genes.

Project ID:PC10005-0024
External Project ID:NSC100-2320-B182-005