OICR enters lung cancer research partnership with world-leading institutes

Dr. Rayjean Hung has been recruited from Europe to work for the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

OICR has taken a major step into international research, joining some of the most important research institutions in the world on the first phase of a large-scale international study on lung cancer.

The study, which is supported by the International Lung Cancer Consortium (ILCCO), hopes to find answers about the genetic origins of lung cancer. This study is unique because of its size: in total there will be over 8,000 case-control pairs in the phase one genome-wide scans, and additional 10,000 case-control pairs will be available for replication studies from institutions in Europe and North America in order to validate the findings. While OICR’s portion of the genome-wide scan was completed in mid-September of this year, the overall study, including analysis, follow-up fine mapping and gene characterization, is expected to take at least four more years to complete.

“There has been significant discussion about the need for more collaboration among funding agencies to share the costs of international cancer genetics projects, especially the costs of genome-wide scans,” says Dr. Tom Hudson, President and Scientific Director of OICR. “OICR was pleased to collaborate with some of the most distinguished research institutions in the world.”

OICR was asked to join the study because of an existing set of data and biospecimens collected from 1,200 individuals by Dr. John McLaughlin, Vice-President, Preventive Oncology at Cancer Care Ontario and Senior Investigator at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto. McLaughlin and his research team collected these samples in a study of lung cancer in Toronto between 1997-2002.

“The funding received for the original study from the National Cancer Institute of Canada included a modest amount for genetic analyses of a few candidate genes,” he says. “Now, with new advances in genomics it is possible to do much more comprehensive and potentially informative genomic analyses in a cost-effective way.” Dr. McLaughlin designed the study from its outset, and received consent from participants to conduct more comprehensive than are now feasible. 

“The lung cancer study achieved its original goals, but genome-wide analyses were not feasible at the time, and even now, a major commitment and international collaboration is required to make this both possible and informative,” McLaughlin says. “That’s why it is so important that OICR provided the support that enabled the Toronto study to join with the ILLCO to be part of this major international initiative.”

OICR provided funding to perform genome-wide genotyping in the recently completed first phase of the ILCCO study. Now the genetic data from the Ontario samples will be pooled with the data collected at the other institutions involved in the first phase of the study, including The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, and the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Texas, to gain more insights into the genetic causes of lung cancer.

An additional benefit derived from OICR’s funding of this study is that it enhances Ontario’s capacity and leadership in innovative cancer research by providing support to a new investigator. Dr. Rayjean Hung was recently recruited to Ontario and will arrive at Toronto’s Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in December. Dr. Hung, who previously worked at IARC and helped to initiate the ILCCO and has been coordinating the consortium since its establishment, will be the principal investigator of this genome-wide association study.

“I am looking forward to analyzing these data and collaborating with different research groups,” Hung says. “I hope that this study will result in a greater understanding of the etiology of cancer and that it can benefit the community as a whole.”

Hudson is enthusiastic about Hung’s appointment. “Dr. Hung provides an important link for Ontario scientists to international research,” he says. “She has worked all over the world and it is an exciting opportunity to have her working here. Her arrival will bring attention to the important work being done in this province.”

Hung will compare the data of the entire human genomes of lung cancer patients to those of healthy people. She hopes to improve the understanding of lung carcinogens and potentially identify the genes related to lung cancer risk. Her analysis will take both genetic and lifestyle information into account to identify the genes that increase lung cancer risk and how they interact with environmental factors.

When the analysis is complete on phase one of the study, the data will contribute to the replication work being planned in ILCCO. “It is important to distinguish true positive findings from false positive findings by independent replications, so we are planning to conduct replications in the ILCCO,” Hung says. “The results of the Ontario study will contribute greatly to the rest of the work being done at the ILCCO.”

Lung cancer researchers have been studying the genetic contribution to lung cancer. While over 80 per cent of lung cancer is caused by tobacco, there are several suspected genetic factors that contribute to susceptibility and there are likely factors that make both smokers and non-smokers susceptible to developing the disease. Researchers rapidly scan markers across complete sets of DNA looking for genetic variations associated with a disease. A larger pool of DNA samples, as in the ILCCO, provides more information for researchers and allows them to gain greater insights into the disease’s genetic origins.

Lung cancer continues to be the most common cancer overall and the leading cause of cancer death in men worldwide, with an estimated 900,000 new cases and 810,000 deaths per year. It is also one of the most common worldwide causes of cancer deaths in women, second only to breast cancer.

The ILCCO, established in 2004, is an international group of lung cancer researchers with the aim of sharing comparable data from ongoing lung cancer case-control and cohort studies.