I would like to express my gratitude to the World Cancer Research Fund for supporting my Mendelian Randomisation study, which aims to comprehensively identify gut microbiome features that may have a causal relationship with different types of cancers in the east Asian population. Findings from this study will provide more credible evidence regarding the relationship of gut microbiome features and cancer, potentially offering new insights into utilising the gut microbiome as an innovative target for cancer prevention and establishing the foundation for future research aimed at unravelling underlying mechanisms linking gut microbiome with cancer risk
Dr Baoting He
Background
In recent years, growing evidence suggests that gut microbiota is linked to the risk of common types of cancer. However, evidence on whether and how the gut microbiota influences cancer biology is still unclear. Recognising bias in observational studies, a new type of study design involving genetics (Mendelian randomisation) has been developed to investigate whether certain types of gut microbiota cause cancer and found some gut microbiota like Ruminococcu were associated with cancers. However, whether these associations apply to east Asian population is unclear.
Aims and objectives
We aim to conduct a Mendelian randomisation study to assess whether and which types of gut bacteria and microbial metabolic pathways impact any of the eight common cancer risks in east Asian populations. We hypothesise that certain types of gut bacteria as well as gut microbial metabolic pathways are linked to an increased risk of certain types of cancers, especially the relationships of gut bacteria and cancer that were consistently shown in previous observational studies or animal studies.
How it will be done
This proposed study will utilise existing publicly available genetic data in the east Asian population. Specifically, we will extract genetic variants influencing the enrichment of gut microbiota the from the genetic data obtained from east Asian individuals, which contains detailed information on types of gut bacteria and microbial metabolic pathways revealed by the analysis in the genes of the gut microbiomes. We will then apply these genetic variants to large scale east Asian genetic data of cancers including colorectal cancer, oesophageal cancer, gastric cancer, lung cancer, hepatic cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, endometrial cancer from genetic data to derive the causal relation of the gut microbiome in cancer risk. We will implement a series of sensitivity analyses to assess the validity of our main findings.
Potential impact
Our study will provide more credible evidence on how gut microbiota might be linked to certain types of cancer in east Asians. The information provided by this study could be valuable for future research into the possibility of using gut microbiota as a target for novel strategies in cancer prevention in this population, such as diet and probiotics.