Gene-environment Interaction Analysis for Height and Colorectal Cancer Initial Meeting with GECCO and IARC

The COVID-19 outbreak has forced us to work from home since March. However, it does not stop us from working on finding novel significant markers in cancer. On Wednesday 6th May 2020, our team had a fascinating online meeting with Ulrike Peters and her team from Genetics and Epidemiology of Colorectal Cancer Consortium (GECCO), Marc Gunter and his team from International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and Andre Kim from University of Southern California.

GECCO is an international collaboration that focuses on the identification and characterization of genetic risk factors and gene-environment interactions for colorectal cancer (CRC). This consortium investigating the impact of germline genetic, environmental and lifestyle risk factors on the tumor genome, microbiome and immune response and the impact on survival. And IARC is an intergovernmental agency forming part of the World Health Organization (WHO) of the United Nations (UN). Its role is to conduct and coordinate research into the causes of cancer.

This meeting was motivated by a common interest in working on the gene-environment interaction analysis for height and colorectal cancer. Despite great differences in time zone, we manage to have a fruitful discussion. In this meeting, we discussed the results across all previous study and our analytical approach for our future research collaboration. We really eager and expecting intriguing insight that we might find in the future.