Aggressive prostate cancer in African men: are microbes involved? Investigating decontamination, microbiomes and human genomics

With an incidence of >1.4 million cases worldwide, prostate cancer is the most common non-skin cancer in men. One in eight men will obtain a diagnosis in their lifetime. However, this is doubled in men of African descent and tends to be more aggressive. A possible reason is that microbial differences contribute. The lab recently found that certain bacteria are associated with aggressive prostate cancer.

Wet-lab and computational methods will be refined for identifying microbes in cancer whole genome sequencing data. These approaches will be applied to large prostate cancer datasets from men of different ethnic backgrounds collected by the large, collaborative international consortia in which the lab are involved. Machine learning will be used to explore the microbiome and genomic features of cancer. Ultimately, important associations will be discovered that could improve patient care.