# A Data-driven Pan-Cancer Study of Biological Bases of Cancer Health Disparities

> **NIH NIH U54** · XAVIER UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA · 2021 · $218,131

## Abstract

A Data-driven Pan-cancer Study of Biological Bases of Cancer Health Disparities
Project Abstract
 To date, significant progress has been made in our understanding of the role of socioeconomic factors
in cancer racial disparities. Increasing evidence now suggests that a number of intrinsic molecular factors
specific to malignant cells must also partly account for the observed health inequalities. Although research has
begun to explore the biological basis of cancer disparities, most existing work is limited to several common
cancer types and does not methodically explore whether the observed genetic and molecular differences
represent the clinically-meaningful racial disparities in other fatal human cancers. Moreover, massive amounts
of multi-faceted omics data generated by high-throughput technologies have not been fully utilized and well
integrated with clinical data to search for race-specific molecular characteristics, biomarkers or potential drug
targets.
 The goal of this RCMI research project is therefore to address these significant limitations by
performing an in-depth, data-driven, pan-cancer study to investigate the cancer-specific mutome, epigenome,
and RNA-Seq transcriptome differences in different racial groups. The proposed study will focus on the eight
TCGA cancer types, with pertinent cancer data from other sources (E.g. dbGaP, GEO, ICGC, etc.) being
systematically utilized for methodology development and/or empirical validation throughout the entire project.
For a specific cancer, in connection with clinical data, we will develop new bioinformatics algorithms and
pipelines to analyze these multiple types of omics data individually and collectively. As such, we will establish a
pan-cancer, race-relevant assemblage of single- and multi- level coherent genes, modules and biological
pathways, some of which will hold significance and promise for clinical use. This will provide large-scale direct
molecular-level evidence for the biological mechanism underlying racial disparities in cancer, which is
practically impossible using the approaches of in vitro, in vivo and/or population follow-up. Furthermore, we will
biologically validate the identified signatures for prostate cancer using clinical samples. A database for all
pinpointed signatures will be constructed so that cancer disparity researchers can interrogate how various
levels of molecular variations may alter gene functions in different cancers and races. A set of efficient and
powerful analytical tools for the proposed data-driven analyses of health disparities in cancer will also be made
publicly available as open source software.
 We anticipate that this project will have a large and sustained impact that will enable us 1) to better
understand the mechanisms underlying the most-studied disparities and to predict understudied disparities
across races for various cancer types; 2) to search for race-specific sets of biomarkers (working through
the causal mechanisms) and potential...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10078883
- **Project number:** 5U54MD007595-13
- **Recipient organization:** XAVIER UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA
- **Principal Investigator:** Kun Zhang
- **Activity code:** U54 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $218,131
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2009-09-24 → 2023-12-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10078883

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10078883, A Data-driven Pan-Cancer Study of Biological Bases of Cancer Health Disparities (5U54MD007595-13). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10078883. Licensed CC0.

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