Solving the Puzzle of Early-Onset Gastric Cancer: Foundation Seed Grant Recipient Expands Strategy
Raghav Sundar, MD, PhD has an ambitious goal of understanding how gastric cancer in young people differs from the disease in older patients—in the hopes that the insights he gains will spur ideas for new treatment approaches. Last year, the Gastric Cancer Foundation backed up this strategy with a $100,000 grant awarded to Sundar, who is an associate professor of medicine (medical oncology) at Yale School of Medicine and member of Yale Cancer Center.
Sundar has made significant progress toward his initial plan of collecting 200 gastric tumor samples and adjacent normal tissue from around the world. His team has started processing 100 of those samples, 30 of which are from people who were diagnosed before the age of 50. They are using advanced imaging technologies to study biomarker expression and the distribution of cells in both cancerous and normal tissues, correlating the data to clinical outcomes.
Now Sundar’s team is expanding their use of a technology known as “tissue microarrays,” which enables the rapid visualization of hundreds of tissue samples simultaneously. In addition to using a microarray developed at Yale, they are intending to study additional microarrays—including one from Massachusetts General Hospital. Sundar’s collaborator at Mass General is former Gastric Cancer Foundation and the American Gastroenterology Association (AGA) research scholar Samuel Klempner, MD.
Sundar is also finalizing agreements to receive additional samples from institutions from across the globe. “This expansion provides unprecedented geographic and demographic diversity that will strengthen the study’s impact and generalizability,” Sundar said.
In June, Sundar made his first data presentation at the prestigious ESMO Gastrointestinal Cancers Congress in Barcelona. An analysis of 94 samples from patients with peritoneal metastasis revealed distinct cellular differences between gastric cancer in early-onset and average-onset patients, he reported.
Sundar’s grant is part of the Gastric Cancer Foundation’s mission to bridge the funding gap for early- and mid-career researchers who are dedicated to finding novel approaches to treating the disease. The grants allow researchers to gather valuable data they can use to apply for larger funding opportunities.
Sundar is grateful for the Foundation’s early support of his research goals.
“For someone like me, who’s new to the United States and just getting my program up and running, this grant has been a true catalyst for what will hopefully be big things to come in the future,” Sundar said.
