Subproject 3 (P3) - Diet & biological age in colorectal cancer

Project lead

Prof. Stefanie Derer, Institut für Ernährungsmedizin (IEM), UKSH

Project description

To understand how the gut responds at the molecular level to individual dietary patterns in the context of inflammation-related carcinogenesis, the research group links functional and metabolic data from cell biology with phenotypic and clinical data from human studies, intestinal 3D organoid cultures, or from animal models of acute or chronic intestinal inflammation and inflammation-related colorectal carcinogenesis. 

Results generated from this subproject will decipher underlying mechanisms of dietary metabolite patterns and their influence on biological aging processes in the context of colorectal carcinogenesis. Finally, data from these metabolomic analyses will be combined with microbiome, epigenome, genome, and proteome data from the same analyzed samples (P4-6) to generate a meta-dataset (P7) that could enable prediction of biological age and risk of recurrence in chronologically young CRC patients in an automated assay (P8). In addition, the experiments in combination with the results of subproject P9 will answer the question whether the divergence of chronological and biological age is driven by nutrition and can be prevented by a personalized nutritional intervention in order to avoid relapses, especially in chronologically young CRC patients.