Eitan Shaulian, PhD
Project Title
Detection of clear cell renal cell carcinoma by analysis of gene-expression in urine
About the Investigator
Dr. Shaulianstudiesy the activity of molecules regulated by stress exposure and affect cell survival.
He finished his B.Sc. and M.Sc. studies in Tel Aviv University, Ph.D. in the Weizmann Institute of science, Post doctorate in the UCSD and Since 2001 he is a member of the Hebrew University Medical School as a principal investigator and a senior lecturer.
About the Research
Kidney cancer is the seventh most common cancer in men and the tenth in women, with over 75,000 new cases diagnosed annually in USA. A simple detection-method for clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC), is nonexistent. It is most frequently detected incidentally and about 30-40% of patients detected with metastatic disease at time of diagnosis. This fact comes with heavy clinical price as treatment efficiency and consequently survival drops dramatically at later stages. We recently identified a group of genes that has a significant prognostic value for kidney cancer. The expression of many of them changes in ccRCC cancers and we assumed that this change is also be reflected in ccRCC patient’s urine. Preliminary experiments confirm our hypothesis but the sample size is too small. In this study, we intend to verify the capacity of this method to be used as a reliable diagnostic method for kidney cancer, using a sample size that will provide a strong statistical confidence. Collecting and analyzing the expression in urine of patients for sufficient time scale, before and after resection will also allow us to validate the method as a tool to detect tumor recurrence.
