Transcriptome analysis methods for improving the identification of cancer driver pathways for difficult-to-treat childhood cancers?

Speaker: Sofie Salama, Jack Baskin School of Engineering, UC Santa Cruz

Host: Professor Anders Krogh, Computational and RNA Biology

Abstract
In this talk, I will share the work of our Treehouse Project. Basically, we focus on RNA-Seq data that is generated for pediatric cancer patients in precision medicine clinical trials. Unfortunately, the standard analysis pipelines (which focus on tumor mutations) only suggest a treatment recommendation for about 10% of these cases. We partner with some of these trials using an analysis approach where we compare the patients’ RNA-Seq data to a reference compendium of RNA-Seq data from >10.000 adult and pediatric tumor samples (mostly from large research projects like the TCGA and ICGC) using a variety methods to identify cancer pathways with druggable targets that appear to be driving the individual tumor sample. These results are communicated to the clinicians via a molecular tumor board for their consideration. The theme of my talk would be that RNA expression analysis is a powerful and valuable tool for precision medicine approaches in cancer.