LUCA-KR

Program Description

Previous large-scale integrative genomic characterisation of lung cancers has mostly been conducted on early-stage, surgically operable tumour tissues. This creates a gap in our molecular

understanding of this disease in that it remains unclear whether previous genomic characterisation of lung cancer realistically reflects the genomic landscape of late-stage lung cancers, which comes with utmost clinical unmet-needs. Late-stage lung cancer has not been systematically interrogated on a large scale with high-quality technical precision, and ICGC ARGO thus provides an opportunity for a systematic survey and re-examination of our current understanding of the late-stage lung cancer genome. The proposed research involves all lung cancer subtypes in Korean patients, for whom oncological treatment information and outcomes are available.

Program Goals and Expected Outcomes

1. To deepen our understanding of the causality relationship between treatment outcomes and genomic profiles of lung cancer. There has been recent rapid progress in immune-oncology drugs and their high success rate in some cancer types, including lung cancer, which provides a unique opportunity to better understand on a genomic level these responses to treatment. 
2. To understand the genomic etiologies that critically influence variation between different ethnic groups with regard to lung cancer.

What gaps in existing knowledge will be addressed by the study?

Lung cancer is one of the more challenging cancer types when it comes to obtaining sufficient tumour samples for high-quality RNA sequencing data. 

To achieve these goals, we will take a two-stage approach:

1. In the early stage of the project, we plan to assess the technical feasibility and implement optimized sequencing protocols that will help to generate large-scale systematic production of genomic data from a limited amount of tumour samples.
2. In the later stage, we will use streamlined procedures that will meet the standard quality threshold of ICGC ARGO, along with extensive clinical and pathological information.

Program Team

See Hoon Lee, MD

Lead Investigator