Vanderbilt University has partnered with GE Global Research to secure a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to help define how colon tumors form and develop at the cellular level.

The research, supported by a five-year, $3.75 million grant from the Office of the Director of the NIH, will test GE’s cancer mapping technology, an automated platform that can probe and analyze up to 60 different disease markers, including proteins and messenger RNAs, in a single tissue sample.

Currently, a diagnosis of cancer and the decision of which therapy to prescribe are based on the histology of the tumor and, in some cases, the expression of one or two disease markers inside a patient’s tumor.

However, a primary issue in cancer diagnosis today is the limited amount of molecular information that is available about a particular cancer. With little information, it’s difficult to determine more specific characteristics of cancer that could reveal how fast or slow it may be growing.

The Vanderbilt-GE award is part of an NIH-funded Single Cell Analysis Program that aims to “understand what makes individual cells unique and to pave the way for medical treatments that are based on disease mechanisms at the cellular level.”

The project, led by GE scientists Michael Gerdes, PhD, and Kashan Shaikh, PhD, and by Robert Coffey, MD, professor of cancer research at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tenn., will explore how intestinal stem cells of the colon contribute to tumor formation and progression, and the signaling pathways associated with the disease.

The cancer mapping technology allows researchers to view cancer with the activation of different signaling pathways in specific cells, according to Gerdes, lead scientist at GE Global Research. The scientists hope to learn more about how cancer forms and progresses, and how to treat it.

GE scientists have developed technology that allows a single tissue section from a sample that is removed during surgery to be imaged for biosignatures, including expression of dozens of proteins and nucleic acids (RNA and DNA) without destroying the integrity of the sample.

“As we have learned, no two patient’s cancer is exactly the same. With colon cancer, some patients exhibit a more aggressive form of the disease compared to other patients,” John Burczak, advanced technology leader in molecular imaging at GE Global Research, said in a press release. “We want to understand these subtleties, so that one day therapies can even be specifically tailored for each patient.”

Gerdes added that the goal is to identify “the mechanisms that drive the aggressive nature of the cancer, and the role that cancer stem cells play in therapeutic resistance.”

GE’s cancer mapping technology will be tested with Vanderbilt investigators from the Epithelial Biology Center.