The proposal seeks to establish:

• A comprehensive compilation (database) of clinical information comprising clinical, histopathological, treatment and follow-up characteristics of past and future gastrointestinal cancer (GIC) cases in Singapore that can be shared by investigators. The characteristics will include clinical (eg age, sex, stage), histopathological (eg. grade, type), treatment (eg. treatment status, regimens) and outcome data (eg. survival, toxicity) from medical records.
• A collection (bank) of corresponding frozen and fixed tissue, blood and processed samples (enriched blood mononuclear cells, protein, RNA, DNA, tissue arrays) in Singapore that can be shared by the investigators.
• A gastrointestinal cancer co-operative group (GCCG) of clinicians and scientists researching prognostic and predictive markers in GIC, which will benefit from the multi-disciplinary knowledge, information and samples of its members.
• To characterise genetic polymorphisms related to Gastrointestinal cancer chemotherapy treatment in controls (healthy volunteers)

Inclusion Criteria:

• Patients with cancers of the gastrointestinal tract (eg. colorectal, gastric, pancreatic, esophageal)

Exclusion Criteria:

• None

To examine associations between candidate markers and patient response, toxicity and other clinicopathological characteristics, standard descriptive statistics will be used, according to the variable type (e.g. continuous, discrete, parametric, non-parametric). Associations with patient outcome will be assessed by Kaplan Meier analysis and independence examined in multivariate models by Cox proportional hazard analysis. To discriminate prognostic and predictive significance, outcome associations of candidate markers will be examined with respect to the treatment status of cohorts as outlined in the "Introduction" and as performed previously.