Modeling of Inter- and Intra- Tumor Heterogeneity

Date: 

Thursday, February 22, 2018, 4:30pm to 5:30pm

Location: 

Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, One Brattle Square Floor 6, Cambridge

Presented by Simona Cristea from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

intratumour5

 

Abstract: Cancer is a disease of the genome and one of the leading causes of death worldwide. One of the main reasons why cancer is hard to treat is tumor heterogeneity, both between different cancer patients, as well as within the single cells comprising individual tumors. During the first part of this talk, I will discuss inter-patient tumor heterogeneity, and present two models, TiMEx: a waiting time model for mutually exclusive cancer alterations, and pathTiMEx: a waiting time model for the joint inference of mutually exclusive cancer pathways and their dependencies in tumor progression. We assume that, in tumor development, alterations can either occur independently, or depend on eachother by being part of the same pathway or by following particular progression paths. During the second part of the talk, I will present a single-cell RNA sequencing study on the intra-patient tumor heterogeneity of triple negative breast cancer, which uncovered unanticipated biological principles related to disease progression.