Cancer Nexus Blog

The Population and Quantitative Health Sciences Cancer-Focused Pilot Project Program was initiated by the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences to provide funding for cancer-focused projects at UMass Chan Medical School. Funding for these pilot projects was provided by the UMass Cancer Center, the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, and the National Cancer Institute (through a multi-center P50 grant iDAPT: Implementation and Informatics – Developing Adaptable Processes and Technologies for Cancer).

In its inaugural year, The Population and Quantitative Health Sciences Cancer-Focused Pilot Project Program awarded funds for two projects. One of the projects went to Chan Zhou, PhD, assistant professor of population & quantitative health sciences, and Minggang Fang, PhD, assistant professor of molecular, cell & cancer biology for their project entitled "Developing computational methods of genome-wide detection of fusion circular RNAs in chronic myeloid leukemia". The project aims to better understand the basis for drug resistance in a subset of patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), a type of blood cancer.

Dr. Chan is interested in using mathematical and statistical methods to analyze large-scale genomic datasets in the biomedical field. She will use her expertise to study a relatively new class of RNA molecules, called fusion circular RNAs, whose role in cancer drug resistance and progression is beginning to emerge. Fusion circular RNAs have recently been found to confer drug resistance in another type of leukemia, called acute promyelocytic leukemia, but whether fusion circular RNAs exist in CML patients is unknown. Dr. Chan notes that "It is actually a technical challenge to detect fusion circular RNAs in cancer, in part because they are very rare."

To address this challenge, Dr. Chan’s project aims to develop new computer algorithms and software to comprehensively identify fusion circular RNAs in CML. Dr. Fang will help generate the experimental datasets that Dr. Chan will analyze, and then confirm that the fusion circular RNAs predicted using Dr. Chan’s approach actually exist in CML patient samples. The results from the study may shed light into the mechanisms that drive drug resistance, and may identify new diagnostic biomarkers that can be used to detect drug-resistant forms of CML.

Watch Dr. Chan’s discussion of the funded pilot project below.