 HBC dot just radio welcome back to our HBC voices of STEM excellent series profiling the best and brightest within the historically black college and university sector today we have an extraordinary guest who's going to be talking about a monumental Undertaken for the Morehouse School of Medicine James W. Lillard is the associate dean for research at the MSM also a professor in microbiology biochemistry and immunology and he is part of a team leading an effort with the AACR the American Association for Cancer Research which is going to by the year 2020 work with 2020 Consented African American Cancer patients to sequence their And I want to get this right doc their genetic data to compare it and broaden our scope and view of what it takes to treat and potentially cure cancer particularly in African American patients correct? Yes that's a great great summary. I'm trying man y'all are the geniuses I'm just trying to keep up with so Dr. Lillard indeed an honor to have you on talk to us about this this partnership because this is huge and for one of the handful of historically black medical schools that we have to play a central role in cultivating this genetic data. How did this come about and you know for the lay persons like me explain exactly what the project is. Right so well we're part of a larger network of all the oncology research information exchange network abbreviated as Orion. It's consist of 18 well 18 comprehensive cancer centers academic comprehensive cancer centers plus Morehouse School of Medicine as the only HBCU minority serving institution in this network. So together where we're hoping to better democratize precision medicine and make it more available for cancer patients with the hope of identifying new biomarkers possibly new drug targets as well as a developing message to better match cancer patients to possibly life saving clinical studies. Now we were talking offline before about just how important this work is and the know what the number 2020 represents. So can you talk a little bit about those population disparities in terms of available you know cancer cancer related data points for African Americans and how this particular initiative will really shrink that space. Right right so as part of this overall movement if you will do in precision medicine and cancer over the last 10 to 15 years scientists around the country have been doing similar studies. But have had for Donald been looking at Caucasian Americans instead of African Americans largely just to give you an idea while the United States African Americans represent roughly 13% of the population. However in these these large molecular data sets only 3% of the cases represented are from African Americans. So that's a you know over a four fold difference and when you consider in the state like Georgia where African Americans represent 30% 32% of our of the population here in Georgia. You can see how how much of a disparity that is. So what what can happen is that in these in these data sets of scientists are studying if African Americans aren't represented. We may overlook a potential biomarkers that might be more prevalent in African Americans to diagnose cancer. Or we may overlook the genetic variants gene variants that might be drug targets that might work optimally in different patients like ours. What could end up happening is creating a kind of unintended health disparity of the future if we're not actively involved in contributing to these precision medicine initiatives. Well that's the big thing like and these are going to be sequencing as you explained it to me sequencing cancer survivors and their data. Can you explain what sequencing is all about and why it matters in trying to get folks signed up and enthusiastic about participating in the initiative to make sure that more people millions of people can benefit as a result. Well you sure so and so DNA is I guess could be considered kind of the blueprint of all of us and you know perhaps nothing is more personal or precise as that unique gene sequence and that exists from person to person. So the same thing the DNA that makes you unique can be mutated in the cancer that to cause a cancer. And that's that's exactly what we're looking for these the blueprint of the cancers or the tumors that pop up as well as the genes that are expressed by those tumors. And that's how when we're sequencing those nucleic acid by nucleic acid and it's essentially just giving ideas it's terabytes of data several terabytes of data per patient. So we're you know in order to make sense of all of that we have to not only sequence the germ line of kind of what's considered like the baseline DNA before it is expressed by the person as well as the cancer cell. A normal cell versus a malignant cell and we're also sequencing all the genes expressed normally versus those that are expressed only by the tumor cell. And then what we what we end up seeing things that shouldn't be expressed are expressed things that should be expressed or significantly downregulated or even mutated and resulting in the various. Differences in cancer subtypes we see even within a given cancer. So you know for an example like prostate cancer can vary even within a person and from person to person and have can range from almost an indolent disease to something extremely aggressive. How does Morehouse become connected with the AACR and with a monumental project like this. Obviously you know their leadership positions but obviously you got to have African Americans advocating for this kind of research to be done otherwise it may not get done. And if you think about the small number of HPC medical schools we have you can imagine how tall of an order that is. So what was it that the school and yourself were able to do to position this work and the necessity of it in front of a group like AACR to get it done and launched and support it. Right well you know I wouldn't say that we went out looking for this type of support per se but we've been leading in this area for quite some time. And it's a team not just myself but we've got a relatively new director of our cancer health equity institute Brian Rivers. He plays leadership role at the AACR. I'll also say that it's also important leadership from the president elect at that time. Mike Caligieri who's now at the city of Hope as its CEO also recognized Morehouse School of Medicine's efforts in cancer health equity and help make this award possible. And in the end this is an initiative that's to conclude in 2020 that's right around the corner in medical you know medical time. What will be the expectation or how will you know that this has been successful. Is it just the number or being able to curate the 2020 patients or is there a data set that you hypothesize you'll arrive at or a certain amount of facts you'll gather. What will have made this initiative successful and able to be translated to the medical community particularly in treatment for black folks. Right now this 2000 specimens or sequencing sets is our first milestone. I hope to exceed we hope to exceed that here in Morehouse School of Medicine through important community partner relationships where we can partner with other community oncology practices that make it part of our network. And just I want to try to put things into perspective. It's a little difficult that but there was a recent study conducted that did a pretty good job of showing just showing how many cases are necessary or needed to kind of level the playing field if you will. When we consider the deficit or shortage of African American cases compared to American American cases. If we could just sequence another three to four hundred African American lung cancer cases for example in the country we could begin to level that playing field. And we can see parity and have enough statistical representation to be able to make better calls in terms of biomarkers and drug targets. And then the final thing again we're honored to have you on today if people want to know more about this particular initiative I know the ACR has a lot of links and a lot of literature on it. But how can folks find out more about this work and other work going on at MSM and how can they support it how can they donate. How can they become participants or you know possibly contact family about being a part of the data gathering process. What can we do to be more part of your work. Oh thanks. Thanks for asking. You could visit our Morehouse School of Medicine website where you can make a donation and learn more about this total cancer care protocol at Morehouse School of Medicine. Now it's important that we have to partner with hospital systems and health care systems where an individual may be receiving care cancer care. So we have select partners at the time being that we're working with. For example we've launched the study initially at Grady Health Systems or Grady Memorial Hospital one of the largest safe net hospitals in Metropolitan Atlanta and actually in the south. One of the largest safe net hospitals in the south where there are around 1100 new analytic or new cancer cases annually.