Tools




Seminars, events & talks

Wednesday, 29th February, 2012, 11:00

Troublemakers in cancer: a tale of usual suspects and novel villains

The expansion of the catalogs of somatic alterations in cancer accelerate as new laboratories release the sequences of cohorts of samples of different tumor types. One of the key challenges posed by this growth is the identification of driver alterations, genes and pathways among all the alterations found in several patients with the same disease. Traditionally, likely driver mutations for instance are identified either by their recurrence or by their impact on protein function. On the other hand, genes and pathways are prioritized according to the recurrence of alterations that they bear in such groups of samples, however this approach have some known limitations. We have developed an approach to improve the capability of known tools to assess the functional impact of somatic mutations, based on  correcting their scores by the baseline tolerance of their bearing proteins. Also, we have developed a method to uncover cancer drivers based on the detection of the bias towards the accumulation of variants with high functional impact across several tumor samples. We present the results of applying this method to several cancer datasets and show that very different pathways to tumorigenesis prevail in each of them.

Speaker: Abel Gonzalez-Perez - Biomedical Informatics, UPF

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