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When the Gastric Cancer Foundation launched the Gastric Cancer Registry at Stanford University in 2011, our hope was that the patient samples housed there would enable early-stage research that could lead to new cures. The registry’s primary investigator, Hanlee Ji, MD, has long believed that data generated from gastric tumor samples could help him and other researchers attract the large grants they need to turn insights into potential therapies—and now he has a major award to demonstrate the value of that model.
Ji, Professor of Medicine at Stanford, is part of a team of researchers awarded a five-year, $9 million grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for a project entitled “Precision Interception of Gastric Cancer Precursors Through Molecular and Cellular Risk Stratification.” Ji is the lead principal investigator with Joo Ha Hwang, MD, PhD, Stanford Professor of Medicine and a specialist in the early detection of gastrointestinal cancers.
The project focuses on a type of precancer called intestinal metaplasia. “This is a lesion that can progress on to cancer, but we don't know which ones are going to progress,” Ji says. “So the focus of this project is to identify specific markers and cell types that will help identify individuals who face the highest risk of cancer.”
The research team is using registry samples to analyze precursor lesions in stomach cancer patients. Huang and Ji started working together in 2020 to analyze tissue samples in the registry, generating early data that Ji feels was crucial for attracting the NCI grant. The expanded research that will be enabled by the grant, Ji adds, “is very important because it may reveal new types of markers or targets for therapy.”
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