TIA Centre Seminar Series: Prof. Azra Raza

Abstract: Cancer will strike 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women. Yet, we are failing spectacularly to improve outcome for the majority of patients. Our contention is that the real solution to the cancer problem is to diagnose cancer early, at the stage of The First Cell. The footprints of early cancers, the surrogate biomarkers, need to be identified so we can detect the first cell. The rapidly evolving technologies are doing much in this area but need to be expanded. We study a pre-leukemic condition called myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) with the hope that we can detect the first leukemia cells as the disease transforms to acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Towards this end, we have collected blood and bone marrow samples on MDS and AML patients since 1984. Today, our Tissue Repository has more than 60,000 samples. We propose novel methods to identify surrogate markers that can identify the First Cell through studying the serial samples of patients who evolve from MDS to AML.