A collaboration between Imperial College London and Somalogic, The Centre for Excellence in Proteomics and Cancer aims to uncover predictive biomarkers for cancer and other chronic diseases.
The initial project will use samples from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), one of the largest biobanks in the world for biochemical and genetic investigations of cancer and other chronic diseases. Baseline blood samples and nearly 20 years of clinical follow up are available. The individual level data from this large prospective cohort study will be used to understand the contribution of various lifestyle and clinical factors associated with relevant clinical outcomes. Combining such a powerful data set with SomaLogic’s large scale SomaScan® Assay should yield important new insights that can potentially be used to enable positive interventions to diagnose, treat or prevent illness. The primary focus of this Project will be cancer detection and susceptibility. Finding biomarkers or proteomic signatures that can predict the risk of individual cancers or even discover if there is a human cancer “susceptibility” phenotype that predisposes an individual to a variety of cancers is currently of great scientific and medical interest.
In addition to facilitating our cancer research objectives, the EPIC program offers an opportunity to investigate the nature of comorbidities, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes Therefore a secondary goal of this Project will be to gain a better understanding of the factors involved in comorbidities, which may empower individuals who are determined to be at higher risk to make lifestyle, therapeutic, habit or dietary interventions that could improve healthy longevity.
