Risk factors and biomarkers of Burkitt lymphoma (BL)

The BL research is organized into four focus areas: a) epidemiology; b) infections; c) genetics, and d) tumor studies. The epidemiological studies seek to characterize the macro- and micro-geographical and spatial-temporal  patterns of endemic Burkitt lymphoma to generate new hypotheses about environmental risk factors. The infection focus seek to discover infection-related biomarkers of risk, focusing on unique serological profiles or discovery of high-risk genetic variants for EBV or Pf infection associated with eBL risk. The genetic studies (GWAS, exome, HLA) provide a powerful approach to complement questionnaire and serological methods with less concern for measurement error, reverse causality, and imperfect correlation with biology to disentangle the genetic architecture of eBL risk.  Finally, BL is a molecular disease with identifiable molecular sub-groups. The EMBLEM study provides an opportunity to collaborate with others on studies to develop a blood-based assay for BL diagnosis and molecular characterization. Students will be given the opportunity to spend time in East Africa with collaborating partners to be involved with data and sample collections.

The primary goals of EMBLEM are to investigate:

a) risk factors of BL in endemic populations in East Africa;

b) EBV and Pf immuno-profiles and other biomarkers associated with BL;

c) molecular characteristics of BL tumor genomes, B-cell receptor, and EBV variants; and

d) germline risk factors of BL using genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and exome sequencing

e) the association between BL and human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class I and II loci.