Hong Zhu, PhD
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common cancer in children. Although cure rates have improved over the past 50 years, cancer outcomes differ by population. Latinos have both the highest incidence of leukemia and the lowest survival rates in the U.S. There are many potential reasons for these differences in health outcomes.
Through a $12 million U54 Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) grant, researchers aim to reduce population-based health outcome differences among children with ALL by identifying genetic and environmental factors that may have contributed to adverse outcomes. In the first SPORE devoted to pediatric leukemia research, Hong Zhu, PhD, professor of biostatistics in the Department of Public Health Sciences and faculty director of Biostatistics and Population Science Shared Resource at the UVA Comprehensive Cancer Center, was awarded $1.5 million from NIH National Cancer Institute/Baylor College of Medicine to provide statistical and data science leadership.
The SPORE includes four research projects aiming to investigate four areas where population-based health outcome differences have been observed, including hepatotoxicity (Project 1), neurotoxicity (Project 2); pharmacogenomics (Project 3); and genetic and environmental contributors to patient-reported outcomes (Project 4). The translational research projects in the SPORE integrate many different types of existing and newly generated data, including biological, clinical, demographic, genomic, metabolomic, lipidomic, molecular, environmental, patient-reported outcomes, and survey and questionnaire data. The U54 Biostatistics and Data Management Core is co-led by Dr. Zhu and Cristian Coarfa, PhD, at Baylor College of Medicine. The core functions as a centralized research design and data science coordination center for all SPORE projects, bringing together expertise and intellectual resources in biostatistics, bioinformatics, geospatial data analysis, and data management for SPORE investigators. The findings from the U54 grant will form the foundation for developing effective risk prediction and intervention strategies to reduce population-based health outcome differences in children and adolescents with ALL.
The multi-institutional U54 SPORE team includes collaborators from the Baylor College of Medicine, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Children’s Hospital Orange County, Emory University, Harvard Pilgrim Health Institute, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, University of California-Los Angeles, University of California-San Francisco, University of Texas Southwestern, and UVA. Debamita Kundu, PhD, assistant professor of biostatistics in the Department of Public Health Sciences at UVA, is a collaborator on this project.
Filed Under: Research