Lectures and seminars OnkPat Friday Seminar: Tracing early colorectal cancer risk factors through epigenetic fingerprints

Host: Kasper Karlsson, Department of Oncology-Pathology

Abstract

Early-onset colorectal cancer (eoCRC), defined as diagnosis before age 50, has increased steadily over the past three decades, suggesting a growing role for environmental and lifestyle exposures. Because many components of the exposome are difficult to measure directly, we developed a tumor-based approach to infer exposures from DNA methylation profiles. Using this methodology, we identified established risk factors such as poor diet and smoking, and also detected a signal for picloram, a pesticide not previously linked to cancer. Importantly, we observed an association between picloram exposure and eoCRC in population-level data, supporting a potential role for this compound in early carcinogenesis.

Bio

Jose A. Seoane is the Head of the Cancer Computational Biology group at Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), Barcelona. Originally trained as a computer scientist, he transitioned to cancer genomics and epigenetics during his postdoctoral training at Stanford University. The primary focus of his lab is to identify biomarkers of drug response in solid tumors, elucidate the role of epigenetics in cancer initiation, progression and metastasis, and identification of cancer risk factors.