Description:

The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics Departmental Seminar Series presents:

Josh Stuart, PhD
Professor, Biomolecular Engineering Department
Baskin Engineering Endowed Chair
Associate Director, Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering
University of California at Santa Cruz

Sequencing cancer genomes has revealed many shared and private variants. However, the link to treatment options for most patients is still missing. While there are a some variants (e.g. BRAF-V600E) that implicate specific drugs (e.g. vemurafenib), or genomic conditions (e.g. high mutation burden) that implicate therapy (e.g. pembro immunotherapy), most tumors harbor DNA changes with no known significance. A growing list of examples demonstrates gene expression is a powerful indicator of treatment such as HER2 for herceptin treatment, EGFR for cetuximab, and tubulin for chemotherapy alternatives. My talk will focus on how the
expression of genes, and associated genetic pathway activities, can be leveraged to find targetable vulnerabilities. I’ll discuss the results of identifying tumor subtypes from the national and international Pan-Cancer projects. The information reveals the oncogenic processes and cells-of-origin of tumor cells that provide a fine-grained molecular-based classification framework for cancer. In addition, constructing genetic network models for specific tumor types reveals inhibitor combinations for individual patients.