# Fatty Liver Disease in African Americans

> **NIH NIH P20** · GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $66,674

## Abstract

Abstract – Project 1 
Obesity is a major health concern that is increasing in prevalence in the U.S. and worldwide, and 
disproportionately affects African Americans. It can lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which in 
turn can lead to liver cancer via chronic hepatitis, but the malignancy is asymptomatic until late stage when 
curative options are unavailable, leading to extremely high mortality. On the other hand, increasing knowledge 
of the mechanistic pathways by which NAFLD leads to cancer offers the possibility to develop early serum 
markers that can stratify patients into those at higher and lower risk: in turn, higher risk patients can undergo 
liver cancer surveillance to identify it early enough for curative surgery. The present proposal is a collaborative 
approach for research at Howard University (HU) and the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center (LCCC) at 
Georgetown University to discover the molecular and genetic signatures of perturbed metabolic and 
mechanistic pathways in NAFLD patients in an African–American (AA) population receiving medical care for 
this condition at Howard University Hospital. Our overall objective is to identify candidate genes and 
genetic pathways associated with NAFLD, to find and fill the knowledge gaps of this extreme health 
disparity issue among AA around the Washington DC region. The two PIs of this pilot study – Dr. 
Christopher Loffredo, a cancer epidemiologist at LCCC, and Dr. Charles Howell, a gastroenterologist and Chair 
of Internal Medicine at Howard University – will co-mentor Dr. Ghosh, an early stage investigator at HU. Dr. 
Ghosh’s expertise is molecular genetics of chronic diseases. Leveraging these complementary areas of 
expertise, we propose to use pilot funding from this P20 proposal to enroll 50 NAFLD patients (cases) and 50 
matched controls at Howard University: they will participate in an interview to provide information on personal 
and medical history, and will agree to a blood draw that will allow us to assess differences in levels of gene 
expression in cancer-relevant mechanistic pathways (e.g. inflammation) that are potential signatures of 
disease progression towards liver cancer. We will actively involve graduate and post-doctoral students in the 
laboratory work. In Specific Aim 1 we will apply a gene expression analysis (microarray coupled with IPA 
analysis) to divulge the differential gene expressions and their pathways in the two groups of subjects. In 
Specific Aim 2 we will validate the candidate disease markers by applying high-throughput TaqMan® Low 
Density Arrays (TLDA). We will validate the precise panel of genes within the particular biological pathways 
and we will integrate clinical, epidemiologic and laboratory data to identify the robustness of these markers 
towards stability, validity, reproducibility, feasibility and utility of this new TLDA approach. The overreaching 
goal of this research is, therefore, to shed new light on possible...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10237992
- **Project number:** 5P20CA242611-03
- **Recipient organization:** GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Somiranjan Ghosh
- **Activity code:** P20 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $66,674
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-09-01 → 2023-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10237992

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10237992, Fatty Liver Disease in African Americans (5P20CA242611-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10237992. Licensed CC0.

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