Circulating Cells in Cancer Detection

The summary for the Circulating Cells in Cancer Detection grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the National Institutes of Health, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Circulating Cells in Cancer Detection: The purpose of this PA is to develop novel technologies for capturing, enriching, and preserving exfoliated abnormal cells and macromolecules in body fluids or effusions and to develop methods for concentrating the enriched cells for biomarker studies. In the context of this PA, we have extended the definition of exfoliation to include not only the cellular materials, but also subcellular materials, such as DNA and proteins. In body fluids, such as sputum, the number of exfoliated tumor cells is often small compared to the number of non-neoplastic cells. Therefore, the detection of exfoliated abnormal cells by routine cytopathology is often limited because few atypical cells may be present in the specimen. There may be difficulty in separating dysplastic cells from non-specific reactive changes and degenerating cells or variation in diagnostic criteria. Furthermore, exfoliated cells are frequently contaminated with normal cells, bacteria, and other cellular debris, which makes molecular analysis difficult without physical separation of the neoplastic cells. Thus, the development of enrichment methods becomes prerequisite for the routine detection of small numbers of exfoliated cells and small amounts of subcellular materials in biological fluids for molecular analysis. Similarly, subcellular materials are in amounts that may not be detectable by available technologies and therefore the enrichment of such materials is of paramount importance. Enrichment will allow exfoliated cells and subcellular molecules, for example from urine, to be used for genomic, proteomic, and epigenomic analyses that may lead to improvements in the detection of bladder cancer through measurements of alterations in expressed genes, peptide profiles, and epigenetic markers.