We are happy to announce that our team, as the part of international collaboration with UK FOCSS and Dana Farber Cancer Institute, was awarded the 2022 Bob Bast’s Translational Research Grant for the project entitled “Blood-based screening for identification and monitoring of women at elevated risk for breast and ovarian cancer”. The grant has been awarded by the Victory Over Cancer (V) Foundation.

Within the project, we will develop and validate a risk assessment method for breast and ovarian cancer. The project will include UK FOCCS cohort, due to their high genetic-based risk of cancer due to DNA damage repair insufficiency. UK FOCCS cohort allowed for blood samples retrieval from patients under intensive screening for cancer, with samples collected in many time points.

This project will focus on transcriptomic analysis of blood samples at the cancer detection to identify biomarkers of early cancer and predict its occurrence in the future. This will allow us to use personalized approach for screening intensity and optimize the treatment plan.

This project is a collaboration between the prof. Dipanjan Chowdhury’s lab (Division of Radiation and Genome Stability, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA), prof. Kevin Elias’s lab (Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA) and prof. Wojciech Fendler (Department of Biostatistics and Translational Medicine, Medical University of Lodz, Poland).

For more information, visit https://www.v.org/grants/dipanjan-chowdhury-phd/