Genetic variability in sporadic colorectal cancer: Searching for novel risk, prognostic and predictive biomarkers

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a major public health problem worldwide. Despite improvements in the diagnostic process and advancement in the treatment methods, the prognosis remains poor. To improve survival rates, it is important to identify people with the predisposition for CRC and to detect the potentially curable early stage of the disease. Furthermore, identifying those who would have an adverse clinical outcome associated with a particular chemotherapy would help to avoid redundant chemotherapy burden in patients and contribute to enhanced therapeutic efficacy, while minimizing treatment-related toxicity. The aim of the Thesis was to search for novel promising diagnostic, prognostic and predictive DNA-based biomarkers of sporadic form of CRC. As each patient is genetically unique, these biomarkers would aid clinicians in better diagnosis and/or in the selection of an optimal type of therapy for an individual CRC patient based on their molecular profile. In order to explore this issue, we investigated several candidate genes in healthy individuals as well as in newly diagnosed cancer patients. The major outcomes of this PhD study, which were fully reported in seven publications included in the present Thesis, are 1) The observation of several candidate single nucleotide polymorphisms in microRNA..