Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related death in Canada. Due to the high number of false positive results in current screening tests, they are not widely used by health care professionals which contributes to a higher mortality rate from the disease. The goal of this program is to develop novel easy-to-administer tests that identify individuals at the earliest, most curable stages of the disease. Dr. Tai’s lab will mainly focus on the genomics aspects of the study and will identify and validate a set of genetic markers that will be suitable for use in screening applications. These screening tests will help to identify people that are at high, medium or low risk of developing polyps and/or colorectal cancer, with the ultimate goal of stratifying high-risk individuals for frequent screening, and low-risk individuals for infrequent screening.