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The Gastric Cancer Registry was launched by the Gastric Cancer Foundation in 2011, and since that time, the Stanford team has recruited nearly 900 patients and close family members to participate. The registry now includes data from 671 tumor samples, which are made available at no charge to researchers around the world. Ji and his colleagues, working with teams of scientists from other institutions, are analyzing the samples with new technologies that are helping them uncover genomic and molecular characteristics of stomach cancer. Their goals are to better understand how the disease starts, and to gain insights that will lead to new diagnostics and treatments.
In a major expansion of the Gastric Cancer Registry, Ji’s team is bringing in genomic expression data from 200 samples provided by Federal University of Para, Brazil. Ji said that collaborations with South American Universities have been particularly valuable to supporting another priority of his team, which is to investigate how the gut microbiome contributes to the development of gastric cancer. As part of the biomarker research, South American universities are collaborating closely with Ji’s team by providing samples and exchanging data. “South America has a much higher prevalence of Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) than the U.S. does. That allows us to study individuals who have H. pylori so we can better understand how that increases the risk for gastric cancer,” he said. “We can also ask questions as to whether there are other bacteria that are important, or whether there’s a global composition of different gut microbes that promote or maintain stomach cancer.”
The Gastric Cancer Registry team is benefiting from new technologies that are enabling advanced methods such as “spatial transcriptomics,” which allows them to study differences in gene expression across different regions of tissues. They can even use the technology to study the genetic makeup of old samples. “That's real game changer, because now we can actually analyze a fair number of archived tissue samples,” Ji said.
Ji’s team is also performing single-cell analysis of tumor samples from 150 patients. “This allows us to separate all of the various cell types and examine them one cell at a time,” he explained. “This will help us determine how normal cells support the cancerous cells.”
Researchers across the world continue to access the registry through its Genome Explorer portal. Ji credits the Gastric Cancer Foundation for continuing to provide critical funding at a time when government funding from sources such as the National Institutes of Health is falling. “With limited federal funding, scientists rely on resources like the Gastric Cancer Foundation and the Gastric Cancer Registry,” he said. “With this support, we’re able to maintain the data so other scientists can access it and continue their research.”
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