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Advances in molecular biomarkers for colorectal cancer: Evolving role of gene expression signature as a biomarkers

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Despite the advances in diagnosis and treatment options; CRC continues to be a significant health burden with more than one million cases worldwide and a disease-specific mortality rate of approximately 33% in developed countries. The identification of novel treatment targets or discovery of non-invasive, sensitive, and specific biomarkers are an urgent need.
In this talk I will first discuss the importance of reliable, robust, accurate, and validated cancer biomarkers for “personalized” cancer therapy (i.e., right drug, right time, right patient, right dose, and schedule) and reducing cancer morbidity and mortality. Then, I will present an overview of the current state in the colorectal cancer biomarkers, including biomarkers in clinical uses and contribution of omics technologies to the process of biomarker discovery. I will further discuss the challenges of discovery pipeline, opportunities and future perspectives. I will also highlight that the transcriptomic profile of colorectal cancer provides us insight into the carcinogenesis and allows the development of prognostic and predictive molecular gene signature models to stratify the high-risk patients with worse prognostic outcomes and poor treatment responses. My talk will be ended with our current study, in which we developed a four-gene-based prognostic gene signature model classifying the CRC patients into low-risk and high-risk groups.
Up to 350 words. No references allowed. Abstracts may be submitted at a later date.