Molecular anatomy of radiation hypersensitivity

Funding Activity

Website
http://purl.org/au-research/grants/nhmrc/145780

Funding Status
Closed

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Funded Activity Summary

Radiotherapy (RT) is a curative anti-cancer treatment employed in around half of all cancer sufferers. Very occasionally, a cancer patient will manifest an unexpected adverse reaction to RT and there is strong evidence for a genetic basis to such RT sensitivity. Despite two decades of research, such reactions cannot currently be predicted prior to treatment and their occurrence limits the intensity, and hence cure rates, of RT for the majority of patients. This project will employ cutting edge technology (DNA Chips, or microarrays) to attempt to understand why some patients suffer significant RT side-effects, while the vast majority do not. We have developed a tissue bank of samples from cancer patients who have had adverse RT reactions, and these samples (and samples from unaffected cancer patients) will be examined by microarrays: the activity of thousands of genes will be evaluated in each experiment, and we shall search for patterns of gene activity which track with RT sensitivity. Should we determine a pattern, this pattern will be checked against a larger number of cases and if it accurately predicts RT sensitivity, could lead to the routine testing of cancer patients prior to RT and the individualisation of cancer therapy. In parallel, we will evaluate the tissues of sensitive patients with assays capable of detecting abnormalities in the response to radiation, which may give clues as to an underlying gene fault(s) which might predispose to radiosensitivity in that individual.

Funded Activity Details

Start Date: 01-01-2001

End Date: 01-01-2003

Funding Scheme: NHMRC Project Grants

Funding Amount: $392,545.00

Funder: National Health and Medical Research Council

Research Topics

ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)

Radiotherapy And Nuclear Medicine

ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)

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Other Keywords

Adverse reactions to radiotherapy | Cancer | DNA microarrays | Gene expression profiling | Human radiosensitivity | Predictive assays | Radiation-induced mRNA modulation | Radiotherapy

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