Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common obesity-related cancers and remains a leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Current precision-medicine approaches rely heavily on genetic and biochemical markers from the patient, but these tools do not fully capture the biological processes that drive CRC progression. The gut microbiome, the trillions of bacteria that live in the human digestive tract, is increasingly recognized as an important contributor to obesity, inflammation, immune function, and CRC development. However, most microbiome biomarkers identified to date have not been sufficiently reproducible for clinical use.

To address this challenge, this project will build upon a recently published Cell study that identified two competing groups of gut bacteria, known as the "Two Competing Guilds" framework, which consistently distinguish healthy and diseased states across thousands of individuals. The research team will use advanced metagenomic sequencing, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), and network-based microbiome analysis to develop a CRC-specific classifier capable of distinguishing cancer patients from healthy individuals and identifying whether a patient's disease is localized or metastatic. By integrating gut microbial signatures, circulating microbial DNA, and inflammatory markers, this work aims to create a new precision-medicine platform that could support earlier detection of aggressive disease and improve treatment decision-making.

Naisi Zhao, DrPH, MHS
Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics & Data Science
Junior Faculty, Kansas Institute for Precision Medicine COBRE
Email: nzhao@kumc.edu