Lung cancer is by far the most deadly of all cancers, killing more than 150,000 men and women in the U.S. annually. Not everyone diagnosed with lung cancer dies of the disease, but if the cancer returns after initially successful treatment, it is usually aggressive and deadly.
Now a scientist who studies factors that contribute to the recurrence of early-stage lung cancers has been recruited to Baylor College of Medicine. Christopher Amos became director for the Institute of Clinical and Translational Research with the help of a Recruitment of Established Investigators Award from CPRIT in 2017. He was chair of the Department of Biomedical Data Science at Geisel, and returns to Texas, where he was on the faculty at MD Anderson for 19 years.
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Lung cancer is by far the most deadly of all cancers, killing more than 150,000 men and women in the U.S. annually. Not everyone diagnosed with lung cancer dies of the disease, but if the cancer returns after initially successful treatment, it is usually aggressive and deadly.
Now a scientist who studies factors that contribute to the recurrence of early-stage lung cancers has been recruited to Baylor College of Medicine. Christopher Amos became director for the Institute of Clinical and Translational Research with the help of a Recruitment of Established Investigators Award from CPRIT in 2017. He was chair of the Department of Biomedical Data Science at Geisel, and returns to Texas, where he was on the faculty at MD Anderson for 19 years.
Somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of early-stage or localized lung cancers relapse within three years. Usually patients with localized lung cancer are treated with surgery or some minimal chemotherapy, but Amos says these treatments aren’t necessarily helpful and also come with some toxicity.
His goal is to identify which genes or which pathways are causing early-stage lung cancers to relapse, so that patients can be treated more effectively when they are first diagnosed.
To do this, he studies tissues obtained by surgical removal of early-stage lung cancers, sequencing both the DNA and RNA within the tumor. Then he follows patients as they receive treatment to see if the cancer returns or goes into long-term remission. He’s working to build a large database linking genetic profiles with clinical outcomes. The biggest difficulty with this type of research is patient follow-up, because patients may have surgery in one hospital but subsequent treatment somewhere else. To this end, he is establishing collaborations to facilitate linking genetic profiles with clinical data.
“It’s important to identify early on which cancers have the potential to relapse, so that these people are treated more aggressively,” Amos says.
He’s also studying how genetic and environmental factors interact to cause disease. “The environmental factors that drive lung cancer are probably the best known of any cancer,” he says, “so it’s a nearly-perfect model for studying gene-environment interactions.”
He says that research has shown that it’s much more complicated than just “smoking causes lung cancer.” He’s found that the length of telomeres, or the end-caps of chromosomes, are very important, and in fact, long telomeres are detrimental — the opposite of what he expected to find. “The good thing about research is that you have certain ideas, you have to test them rigorously, and you have to be totally open to being 100 percent wrong,” he says.
Amos is enjoying being back in Texas after five years in New Hampshire. The diversity of Texans allows him to learn about genetic factors relevant to lung cancer in different populations. He says Baylor provides flexibility and support for collaboration with other academic groups and also the potential for partnering with businesses.
And the CPRIT award enabled him to fully fund his lung cancer relapse research — a project he began at Dartmouth but did not have the resources to pursue. With the award he also helped build up the high-performance computing resources at Baylor and invest in data storage — both of which are useful for many different research groups.
Amos received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Reed College, and his Ph.D. in biometry from Louisiana State University Medical Center. He was on the faculty at MD Anderson for 19 years before becoming a professor of Family and Community Medicine at Geisel in 2012, and then chair of the new Department of Biomedical Data Science there in 2014.
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