Deliang Tang, MD, DrPH

Dr. Deliang Tang's primary research consists of two major components, the first being the development and validation of susceptibility and exposure/effect biomarkers and the second being the development of statistical risk models. 1. Development and validation of biomarkers: Dr. Tang is currently analyzing the GSTM1, GST theta, NAT2 and MspI genotypes in ongoing studies of breast cancer, lung cancer and chemoprevention. This work will assess whether these genotypes are associated with disease status and how genotype interacts with environmental exposures. Dr. Tang recently developed a Western blot assay to detect cyclin D1 in peripheral blood samples. The preliminary data show that the presence of cyclin D1 in blood is significantly more prevalent in samples from breast cancer cases than either healthy or benign breast disease controls. This marker appears to be much more strongly associated with breast cancer than previous blood markers such as erbB-2 or ras p21, and may be of use in the clinical management of this disease. 2. Development of new statistical approaches to assess individual susceptibility using biomarker data. The model includes possible gene-environmental interactions, gene-gene interactions and gene-disease associations. It is readily apparent that as the number of genotypes and exposure markers measured per subject grows ever larger, new statistical modeling techniques will be needed. Dr. Tang is currently working on whether discriminative or PATH modeling technique can be used to create new predictive risk models based on the data generated from multiple biomarkers, and to develop further the model to deal with the mass quantities of genetic data that are expected from the "gene chip" technology. A major goal of this research is early cancer detection, based on biomarker analysis.