The NIH allocated $4.6 million to better identify lung cancer

Lung cancer screening by chest computed tomography (CT) can detect lung cancer early and reduce the mortality rate of the disease; But even in medium-risk nodules, only a small percentage are cancerous
.

Dr.
Marc Lenburg, a professor of medicine in the Division of Computational Medicine at Boston University's Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, is working on solving this problem
.
He has been awarded a five-year, $4.
6 million U2C grant
from the National Institutes of Health.

His goal is to develop and validate innovative biomarkers extracted from nasal swabs, blood, and advanced imaging assays to identify intermediate-risk lung nodules detected through screening or as part of routine clinical care as lung cancer
.
"This will expedite cancer treatment while minimizing invasive testing and clinical uncertainty
for patients with non-cancerous nodules," Lenburg said.

The project continues a more than 10-year collaboration between researchers at Boston University, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the Lacey Health Center, led by Lemberg, Dr.
Jennifer E.
Beane-Ebel of Boston University, and Steven Dubinett, M.
D.
, and Dr.
William Hsu
, UCLA.

The researchers will work with two molecular diagnostic companies, Veracyte (NASDAQ:VCYT) and LungLife Al (LON:LLAI), to refine and standardize these biomarkers so that useful biomarkers can be quickly put into clinical use
.
The project expands on previous genomics studies at BUSM, which identified lung cancer-associated airway damage fields that could be used for lung cancer detection
.

Lenburg is part of a research group that includes Avrum Spira, MD, MSc of Beane and BUSM, who are well-known
in genomic technology and translational bioinformatics.
Their main research interests are in the molecular pathogenesis of tobacco-related diseases such as lung cancer, using genomic techniques to identify novel therapeutic targets and biomarkers to guide clinical management
.
Some of this work is already benefiting patients: a nasal swab genomic test for lung cancer that the team helped develop is currently being used in a large prospective clinical utility study to demonstrate its impact
on clinicians in the management of patients with lung nodules found on CT scans.

The new study is part of the NCI Early Detection Research Network (EDRN), which was established in 2000 to partially transform the detection
of early-stage cancer by promoting innovative and rigorous approaches to biomarker discovery and validation.
Since then, EDRN has grown to more than 300 investigators
.
Lemberg's research has been supported
by EDRN since 2010.