Postdoc Recipient: Dr Zhoufeng Ye, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne
Supervisors: A/Professor Shuai Li.
Funding: $40,000 in GERA’s Postdoc Fellowships Round 2 (2026)
About the project: This project will investigate whether pre-diagnostic blood DNA methylation captures shared or cancer-specific biological processes underlying risk of breast, colorectal and lung cancer. Epigenome-wide association studies have identified many CpG sites associated with cancer risk, but replication across studies and cancer types has been limited, suggesting that higher-order biological signals may be more informative than individual CpG markers.
Dr Ye will use nested case-control data from prospective cohorts, including the Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study (MCCS) and EPIC-Italy, with additional replication sought in international studies such as PLCO, NOWAC and ESTHER. In these pre-diagnostic samples, she will compute established DNA methylation-derived biomarkers that reflect key processes implicated in carcinogenesis: biological ageing, smoking exposure, metabolic dysfunction and chronic low-grade inflammation.
Using harmonised analytical pipelines and appropriate regression models, the project will estimate associations between each methylation-derived biomarker and risk of breast, colorectal and lung cancer, and compare patterns across cancer types to distinguish shared systemic processes from cancer-specific effects. Multivariable models will also assess whether combinations of these biomarkers improve risk discrimination within individual cancers.
By shifting focus from single CpG signals to composite biological measures, this project addresses a major limitation in cancer epigenetic epidemiology and will clarify whether ageing, inflammation, metabolic dysfunction and smoking leave common or distinct molecular footprints in blood prior to diagnosis of breast, colorectal and lung cancer. The findings will provide a foundation for future biomarker-based risk stratification research and the development of integrated epigenetic tools to support cancer prevention in population settings.
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