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LIVE – Day 1, OCTOBER 18 @The 16th annual EmTech MIT – A Place of Inspiration, October 18-20, 2016, Cambridge, MA

Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LPBI) Group, Boston

pharma_bi-background0238

will cover in REAL TIME

The 16th annual EmTech MIT – A Place of Inspiration, October 18-20, 2016, Cambridge, MA

http://events.technologyreview.com/emtech/16/

In attendance, streaming LIVE using Social Media

Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

Editor-in-Chief

http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com

@pharma_BI

@AVIVA1950

#emtechmit

2.1.5.8

2.1.5.8   LIVE – Day 1, OCTOBER 18 @The 16th annual EmTech MIT – A Place of Inspiration, October 18-20, 2016, Cambridge, MA, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 2: CRISPR for Gene Editing and DNA Repair

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2016

SOURCE

http://events.technologyreview.com/emtech/16/#section-schedule

  • 8:00
    Registration & Breakfast
  • 9:00
    Opening Remarks
    Emerging technologies, including:

    – Rethinking Energy

    — Rewrite Biology

    – Virtual Reality, Augmented Life

    – Artificial intelligence

    – Global Connectivity

    – Engineering a Healthy Planet

    – Spotlight talks on the 10 Breakthrough Technologies

    – Celebration of the 2016 Innovators Under 35

  • 9:15
    Connecting for Greater Opportunity: Defining the Digital Era – from FaceBook 1.2 Billion customers around the World.
     – awareness affordability and infrastructure

    – 4G in US, Scandenavia, Japan, 3G in Europe, India 2G network, distribution of World population, Density of 1 sq Km, 1.6 Billion do not have mobile connections. Terragraph in Urban center to leapfrog UAVs to be used for connectivity. Terragraph Overview – ETHERNET CONNECTIVITY – GIGABIT – unlicensed 60GHz Spectrum, cloud computing, Open/R: IPv6 – Laser communication: comparable to fiber optics, 10s of Gbps per second, atmosphere absorbs and scatter: pointing and tracking system, Satellite. FACEBOOK Priorities: Density of Population, Gov’t will be favorable, population have not enough — #1 is INDIA, CHINA

  • 9:45

    Innovators Under 35 Introduction – Brian Bergstein, Editor of Technology Review

  • 10:00

    Meet Young Inventors

     – Blendoor – Stephanie Lampkin
    – MACH – Eshan Hoque Social Skills Trainer – My Automated Conversation Coach – ROCspeak.com
    – HandTalk – Ronaldo Tenorio – Deaf People 6 million people in Brazil, barrier between Hearing and Deaf people – sign language
    – Energy Systems Requires Water, Lake Mead by Kelly Sanders – energy vs bottle water
  • 10:30
    Break & Networking
  • 11:00 Antolio Regalado, Editor Biotech at MIT Technology Review

    Gene Therapy- A New Era of Medicine

    CEO & Founder, Intellia Therapeutics, Nessan Bermingham, PhD, 2018 there will be the product in Clinics
    – Gene Editing,
    – CRISPR Cas9 – immune system of Bacteria, using the mechanism in Bacteria for Human cells, Cellular level
    – cut DNA, coopting and shut down  – cut a piece of DNA convert a mutation,
    – injection of cRISPR protein – correction and the existing malformed is repaired no longer expressed
    – stem cells modifies and re-injected
    – KO: ATTR, AATD, HBV
    – Repair: AATD, HSCs
    – CAR-T cells
    – genetic engineering vs gene repair
    – equal access to therapy

    MGH – Cellular Immunotherapy Program – Marcella Maus, PhD on T-Cell research

    – blocking the checkpoints by antibo- dies, Use Tcells as drugs, scale the process, manufacturing process, recover T cell from Blood, from biopsy, who is responding and who does not respond? – Leukemia, CAR- T cells, multiple Myeloma, CURE is early to use but now it can be used COMBINATION of gen therapy follwoing gene editing and immunotherapy, CAR T- cell products for leukemia and lymphoma
  • Katheirne High, Spark Therapeutics

  • bring therapeutics to people – research to clinic
  • DNA defective, engineered from AAV: Vector, DNA, Target tissue to delivery
  • conjenetive blindness – investigational trial – get vector to retina by surgeon – clinical gain of function notices in 30 days group injected vs control group – impproved light sensitivity and mobility
  • first gene therapy for blindness
  • Himophilia – vector injected in the Liver where blood factors are produced
  • models of therapeuitcs: Bone marrow transplantation,
  • clinical cell therapy – low efficacy in adverse events – academic medical center and NIH interested vs Biotech
  • as Clinical Trials were successful Biotech and Pharma got interested
  • Access, pricing, reimbursement – How gene therapy is ONCE in a life time not an an infusion on a reccurent basis over many years – Hymophillia,  no pharmacological treatment to blindness
  • duration of expression 5 years and counting in UK, follwoing gene therapy
  • premature for cure
  • 2:00

    The Robots Among Us –

    Stephanie Tellex, Brown University
    – 35 cm lens – Robots Distributive Lab @MIT – movie
    Sangbae Kim – Robots at Work – Robotics Mobility of the Future @MIT Mechanical Engineering
    – Physical interaction – BMW i3 Factory – automotive production
    – Robot design paradigms: Manufacturing (lack of compliance) vs construction (lack of efficiency)
    – Robot design for mobility – a robot that runs – MIT Cheeta Model
    – MIT  meche Biomimetic Robotics Lab – high torque, high impact mitigation
    – Hermes project:
    Karl Iagnemma – Intellignet Machines – nuTonomy – Singapore  – Autonomous machines deliver parcels and car is never distracted – driverless car
    – Robotics Lab at MIT – smart car, self driven cars, ability to learn from experience – 2017 – double fleet of drivers
  • 12:30

    Lunch & Networking

    Meet Young Inventors under 35

  • Jagdish Chaturvedi – ENTraview – device was licensed to Medtronic and to an Indian company, developed two more product InnAccel – Bangalor — product design company
  • Wei Gao – Wearable Tech – Wearable Human Sweat Sensors
  • Imaging Technologies by Muyinatu BiSI Bell Sounds – Amplitude vs Coherence
  • Heather Bowerman – Hormonal Disease: Endometriosis 10% of Woman – microRNA DotLab
  • 12:00

  • 3:00 Meet the 2016 Innovators Under 35

Jiawei Gu Ling Robotics – Intelligent life with Robots and AI inside – Life UnpluggedInfinite of robots, Intelligence of things,
Nora Ayanian, USC – Computer vision
Maithilee Kunda, Vanderbuilt University, CS – Computer vision
Oriol V. Google, AI & Machine Learning – Deep Natural Network
Machine Translation, Text to Speech,
3:30
  1. Break & Networking

4:00

A.I.’s Next Leap Forward – David Cox at Harvard University

  1. networks, computations and computers as metaphor for Neuro Science and Brain Science
  2. Brains are computational systems – Petaflops of computations
  3. Deep learning, Artificial neuronet works – NeuroNets
  4. Vision theory – ImageNet error rate in decrease tendency
  5. Machine Intelligence from Cortical – DARPA
  6. Genetics and microscopes – like wire tap in the brain
  7. Model of Brain mapped – set hypothesis on function and anatomy

 Big Data – Ruslan Salakhutdinov. Carnegie Mellon

  1. Natural language
  2. multimodal learning – nearest Images
  3. unsupervised learning – no labelled data, natural Story Telling
  4. Image understanding – deep learning
  5. Caption generation
  6. Semantic Relatedness: Recurrent Neural Network
  7. One shot learning
  8. Transfer learning
  9. Summary: Image tagging, Category hierarchy, Speech recognition

XPrize

  • Google Lunar
  • Qualcomm Tricorder
  • Casio Cardon
  • Shell Ocean Discovery

5:00

Lemelson-MIT Prize Honors & Reception

Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab Camera Culture Group

Making Invisible Visible: Matter

  1. Light to slow motion
  2. Multi-path analysis
  3. Published in Nature 2012
  4. DARPA REVEAL Program 2015
  5. Optical Brush Endoscope
  6. Optical matter – reading in spectrum THz Imaging
  7. wifi Camera – see through walls
  8. EyeNetra: Eyeglasses Perscription on Phone
  9. EyeSelfie
  10. Camera for the Visual Challenged
  11. Peer-to-Peer Invention – No upfront Team, Problem – Solution – REDX – sleep apnea
  12. Blood supply Chain
  13. Monitize garbage
  14. Informal Sector: Street address for all – $1 wearable
  15. The World is a Lab – REDX.io – Affordable Excellence

Lemelson Family FOundation based in Oregon is recognizing Ramesg Raskar for 2016 – MIT Prize. Inventors are recognized in the last 20 years – translation of ideas to products.

Read Full Post »

Milestones in Physiology & Discoveries in Medicine and Genomics: Request for Book Review Writing on Amazon.com

physiology-cover-seriese-vol-3individualsaddlebrown-page2

Milestones in Physiology

Discoveries in Medicine, Genomics and Therapeutics

Patient-centric Perspective 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B019VH97LU 

2015

 

 

Author, Curator and Editor

Larry H Bernstein, MD, FCAP

Chief Scientific Officer

Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence

Larry.bernstein@gmail.com

Preface

Introduction 

Chapter 1: Evolution of the Foundation for Diagnostics and Pharmaceuticals Industries

1.1  Outline of Medical Discoveries between 1880 and 1980

1.2 The History of Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology in the late 19th and 20th Century

1.3 The Classification of Microbiota

1.4 Selected Contributions to Chemistry from 1880 to 1980

1.5 The Evolution of Clinical Chemistry in the 20th Century

1.6 Milestones in the Evolution of Diagnostics in the US HealthCare System: 1920s to Pre-Genomics

 

Chapter 2. The search for the evolution of function of proteins, enzymes and metal catalysts in life processes

2.1 The life and work of Allan Wilson
2.2  The  evolution of myoglobin and hemoglobin
2.3  More complexity in proteins evolution
2.4  Life on earth is traced to oxygen binding
2.5  The colors of life function
2.6  The colors of respiration and electron transport
2.7  Highlights of a green evolution

 

Chapter 3. Evolution of New Relationships in Neuroendocrine States
3.1 Pituitary endocrine axis
3.2 Thyroid function
3.3 Sex hormones
3.4 Adrenal Cortex
3.5 Pancreatic Islets
3.6 Parathyroids
3.7 Gastointestinal hormones
3.8 Endocrine action on midbrain
3.9 Neural activity regulating endocrine response

3.10 Genomic Promise for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Dementias, Autism Spectrum, Schizophrenia, and Serious Depression

 

Chapter 4.  Problems of the Circulation, Altitude, and Immunity

4.1 Innervation of Heart and Heart Rate
4.2 Action of hormones on the circulation
4.3 Allogeneic Transfusion Reactions
4.4 Graft-versus Host reaction
4.5 Unique problems of perinatal period
4.6. High altitude sickness
4.7 Deep water adaptation
4.8 Heart-Lung-and Kidney
4.9 Acute Lung Injury

4.10 Reconstruction of Life Processes requires both Genomics and Metabolomics to explain Phenotypes and Phylogenetics

 

Chapter 5. Problems of Diets and Lifestyle Changes

5.1 Anorexia nervosa
5.2 Voluntary and Involuntary S-insufficiency
5.3 Diarrheas – bacterial and nonbacterial
5.4 Gluten-free diets
5.5 Diet and cholesterol
5.6 Diet and Type 2 diabetes mellitus
5.7 Diet and exercise
5.8 Anxiety and quality of Life
5.9 Nutritional Supplements

 

Chapter 6. Advances in Genomics, Therapeutics and Pharmacogenomics

6.1 Natural Products Chemistry

6.2 The Challenge of Antimicrobial Resistance

6.3 Viruses, Vaccines and immunotherapy

6.4 Genomics and Metabolomics Advances in Cancer

6.5 Proteomics – Protein Interaction

6.6 Pharmacogenomics

6.7 Biomarker Guided Therapy

6.8 The Emergence of a Pharmaceutical Industry in the 20th Century: Diagnostics Industry and Drug Development in the Genomics Era: Mid 80s to Present

6.09 The Union of Biomarkers and Drug Development

6.10 Proteomics and Biomarker Discovery

6.11 Epigenomics and Companion Diagnostics

 

Chapter  7

Integration of Physiology, Genomics and Pharmacotherapy

7.1 Richard Lifton, MD, PhD of Yale University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute: Recipient of 2014 Breakthrough Prizes Awarded in Life Sciences for the Discovery of Genes and Biochemical Mechanisms that cause Hypertension

7.2 Calcium Cycling (ATPase Pump) in Cardiac Gene Therapy: Inhalable Gene Therapy for Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension and Percutaneous Intra-coronary Artery Infusion for Heart Failure: Contributions by Roger J. Hajjar, MD

7.3 Diagnostics and Biomarkers: Novel Genomics Industry Trends vs Present Market Conditions and Historical Scientific Leaders Memoirs

7.4 Synthetic Biology: On Advanced Genome Interpretation for Gene Variants and Pathways: What is the Genetic Base of Atherosclerosis and Loss of Arterial Elasticity with Aging

7.5 Diagnosing Diseases & Gene Therapy: Precision Genome Editing and Cost-effective microRNA Profiling

7.6 Imaging Biomarker for Arterial Stiffness: Pathways in Pharmacotherapy for Hypertension and Hypercholesterolemia Management

7.7 Neuroprotective Therapies: Pharmacogenomics vs Psychotropic drugs and Cholinesterase Inhibitors

7.8 Metabolite Identification Combining Genetic and Metabolic Information: Genetic association links unknown metabolites to functionally related genes

7.9 Preserved vs Reduced Ejection Fraction: Available and Needed Therapies

7.10 Biosimilars: Intellectual Property Creation and Protection by Pioneer and by

7.11 Demonstrate Biosimilarity: New FDA Biosimilar Guidelines

 

Chapter 7.  Biopharma Today

8.1 A Great University engaged in Drug Discovery: University of Pittsburgh

8.2 Introduction – The Evolution of Cancer Therapy and Cancer Research: How We Got Here?

8.3 Predicting Tumor Response, Progression, and Time to Recurrence

8.4 Targeting Untargetable Proto-Oncogenes

8.5 Innovation: Drug Discovery, Medical Devices and Digital Health

8.6 Cardiotoxicity and Cardiomyopathy Related to Drugs Adverse Effects

8.7 Nanotechnology and Ocular Drug Delivery: Part I

8.8 Transdermal drug delivery (TDD) system and nanotechnology: Part II

8.9 The Delicate Connection: IDO (Indolamine 2, 3 dehydrogenase) and Cancer Immunology

8.10 Natural Drug Target Discovery and Translational Medicine in Human Microbiome

8.11 From Genomics of Microorganisms to Translational Medicine

8.12 Confined Indolamine 2, 3 dioxygenase (IDO) Controls the Homeostasis of Immune Responses for Good and Bad

 

Chapter 9. BioPharma – Future Trends

9.1 Artificial Intelligence Versus the Scientist: Who Will Win?

9.2 The Vibrant Philly Biotech Scene: Focus on KannaLife Sciences and the Discipline and Potential of Pharmacognosy

9.3 The Vibrant Philly Biotech Scene: Focus on Computer-Aided Drug Design and Gfree Bio, LLC

9.4 Heroes in Medical Research: The Postdoctoral Fellow

9.5 NIH Considers Guidelines for CAR-T therapy: Report from Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee

9.6 1st Pitch Life Science- Philadelphia- What VCs Really Think of your Pitch

9.7 Multiple Lung Cancer Genomic Projects Suggest New Targets, Research Directions for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

9.8 Heroes in Medical Research: Green Fluorescent Protein and the Rough Road in Science

9.9 Issues in Personalized Medicine in Cancer: Intratumor Heterogeneity and Branched Evolution Revealed by Multiregion Sequencing

9.10 The SCID Pig II: Researchers Develop Another SCID Pig, And Another Great Model For Cancer Research

Epilogue

Read Full Post »

On its way for an IPO: mRNA platform, Moderna, Immune Oncology is recruiting 100 new Life Scientists in Cambridge, MA, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 1: Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)

On its way for an IPO: mRNA platform, Moderna, Immune Oncology is recruiting 100 new Life Scientists in Cambridge, MA

Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

 

Deals:

Moderna has now raised $1.9 billion from investors like AstraZeneca – 9% stack [AstraZeneca’s Pascal Soriot helped get that all started with a whopping $240 million upfront in its 2013 deal, which was tied to $180 million in milestones.], with another $230 million on the table from grants. In addition to the financing announcement this morning, Moderna is also unveiling a pact to develop a new Zika vaccine, with BARDA putting up $8 million to get the program started while offering an option on $117 million more to get through a successful development program.

Novel Strategy in Biotech:

in biotech. Instead of grabbing one or two new drugs and setting out to gather proof-of-concept data to help establish its scientific credibility, the company has harvested a huge windfall of cash and built a large organization before even entering the clinic. And it did that without turning to an IPO.

Pipeline include:

  • The deal with AstraZeneca covers new drugs for cardiovascular, metabolic and renal diseases as well as cancer.
  • partners filed a European application to start a Phase I study of AZD8601, an investigational mRNA-based therapy that encodes for vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGF-A)
  • Moderna CEO spelled out plans to get the first 6 new drugs in the clinic by the end of 2016.
  • The first human study was arranged for the infectious disease drug mRNA 1440, which began an early stage study in 2015.
  • Moderna built up a range of big preclinical partnerships.
  • CEO Bancel says the number of drugs in development has swelled to 11, with the first set of data slated to be released in 2017.
  • Moderna also plans to add about 10 drugs to the clinic by next summer,

 

SOURCES

UPDATED: Booming Moderna is raising $600M while ramping up manufacturing and clinical studies

$1.9B in: Moderna blueprints $100M facility, plans to double the pipeline after a $474M megaround

http://endpts.com/moderna-blueprints-100m-facility-plans-to-double-the-pipeline-after-a-474m-megaround/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Issue:%202016-09-07%20BioPharma%20Dive%20%5Bissue:7155%5D&utm_term=BioPharma%20Dive

 

Moderna Therapeutics Deal with Merck: Are Personalized Vaccines here?

Curator & Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, PhD – August 11, 2016

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/08/11/moderna-therapeutics-deal-with-merck-are-personalized-vaccines-here/

 

at #JPM16 – Moderna Therapeutics turns away an extra $200 million: with AstraZeneca (collaboration) & with Merck ($100 million investment)

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN – January 13, 2016

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/01/13/at-jpm16-moderna-therapeutics-turns-away-an-extra-200-million-with-astrazeneca-collaboration-with-merck-100-million-investment/

Read Full Post »

Inotuzumab Ozogamicin: Success in relapsed/refractory Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL)

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

 

About Inotuzumab Ozogamicin

Inotuzumab ozogamicin is an investigational antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) comprised of a monoclonal antibody (mAb) targeting CD22,9 a cell surface antigen expressed on approximately 90 percent of B-cell malignancies,10 linked to a cytotoxic agent. When inotuzumab ozogamicin binds to the CD22 antigen on malignant B-cells, it is internalized into the cell, where the cytotoxic agent calicheamicin is released to destroy the cell.11

Inotuzumab ozogamicin originates from a collaboration between Pfizer and Celltech, now UCB. Pfizer has sole responsibility for all manufacturing, clinical development and commercialization activities for this molecule.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL)

is an aggressive type of leukemia with high unmet need and a poor prognosis in adults.4The current standard treatment is intensive, long-term chemotherapy.5 In 2015, it is estimated that 6,250 cases of ALL will be diagnosed in the United States6, with about 1 in 3 cases in adults. Only approximately 20 to 40 percent of newly diagnosed adults with ALL are cured with current treatment regimens.7 For patients with relapsed or refractory adult ALL, the five-year overall survival rate is less than 10 percent.8

REFERENCES

1 Fielding A. et al. Outcome of 609 adults after relapse of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL); an MRC UKALL12/ECOG 2993 study. Blood. 2006; 944-950.

2 U.S. Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act. Available at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-112publ144/pdf/PLAW-112publ144.pdf(link is external).Accessed July 11, 2015.

3 U.S. Food and Drug Administration Frequently Asked Questions: Breakthrough Therapies. Available at:http://www.fda.gov/RegulatoryInformation/Legislation/FederalFoodDrugandCosmeticActFDCAct/SignificantAmendmentstotheFDCAct/FDASIA/ucm341027.htm(link is external). Accessed July 11, 2015.

4 National Cancer Institute: Adult Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Treatment (PDQ®) – General Information About Adult Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). Available at:http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/treatment/adultALL/HealthProfessional/page1(link is external). Accessed July 11, 2015.

5 American Cancer Society: Typical treatment of acute lymphocytic leukemia. Available at:http://www.cancer.org/cancer/leukemia-acutelymphocyticallinadults/detailedguide/leukemia-acute-lymphocytic-treating-typical-treatment(link is external). Accessed July 11, 2015.

6 American Cancer Society: What are the key statistics about acute lymphocytic leukemia? Available at:http://www.cancer.org/cancer/leukemia-acutelymphocyticallinadults/detailedguide/leukemia-acute-lymphocytic-key-statistics(link is external). Accessed February 18, 2015.

7 Manal Basyouni A. et al. Prognostic significance of survivin and tumor necrosis factor-alpha in adult acute lymphoblastic leukemia. doi:10.1016/j.clinbiochem.2011.08.1147.

8 Fielding A. et al. Outcome of 609 adults after relapse of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL); an MRC UKALL12/ECOG 2993 study. Blood. 2006; 944-950.

9 Clinicaltrials.gov. A Study of Inotuzumab Ozogamicin versus Investigator’s Choice of Chemotherapy in Patients with Relapsed or Refractory Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. Available at: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01564784?term=inotuzumab&rank=7(link is external). Accessed July 11, 2015.

10 Leonard J et al. Epratuzumab, a Humanized Anti-CD22 Antibody, in Aggressive Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma: a Phase I/II Clinical Trial Results. Clinical Cancer Research. 2004; 10: 5327-5334.

11 DiJoseph JF. Antitumor Efficacy of a Combination of CMC-544 (Inotuzumab Ozogamicin), a CD22-Targeted Cytotoxic Immunoconjugate of Calicheamicin, and Rituximab against Non-Hodgkin’s B-Cell Lymphoma. Clin Cancer Res. 2006; 12: 242-250.

SOURCE

http://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer_s_inotuzumab_ozogamicin_receives_fda_breakthrough_therapy_designation_for_acute_lymphoblastic_leukemia_all

Other related article Published on this Open Access Online Scientific Journal include the following:

STORY OF A LEUKEMIA FIGHTER

Nicole L. Gularte, MBA

Cancer & the Future: Immunotherapy

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/?s=Acute+Lymphoblastic+Leukemia+%28ALL%29+

Read Full Post »

A New Computational Method illuminates the Heterogeneity and Evolutionary Histories of cells within a Tumor, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 1: Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)

A New Computational Method illuminates the Heterogeneity and Evolutionary Histories of cells within a Tumor

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

 

Start Quote

Numerous computational approaches aimed at inferring tumor phylogenies from single or multi-region bulk sequencing data have recently been proposed. Most of these methods utilize the variant allele fraction or cancer cell fraction for somatic single-nucleotide variants restricted to diploid regions to infer a two-state perfect phylogeny, assuming an infinite-site model such that each site can mutate only once and persists. In practice, convergent evolution could result in the acquisition of the same mutation more than once, thereby violating this assumption. Similarly, mutations could be lost due to loss of heterozygosity. Indeed, both single-nucleotide variants and copy number alterations arise during tumor evolution, and both the variant allele fraction and cancer cell fraction depend on the copy number state whose inference reciprocally relies on the relative ordering of these alterations such that joint analysis can help resolve their ancestral relationship (Figure 1). To tackle this outstanding problem, El-Kebir et al. (2016) formulated the multi-state perfect phylogeny mixture deconvolution problem to infer clonal genotypes, clonal fractions, and phylogenies by simultaneously modeling single-nucleotide variants and copy number alterations from multi-region sequencing of individual tumors. Based on this framework, they present SPRUCE (Somatic Phylogeny Reconstruction Using Combinatorial Enumeration), an algorithm designed for this task. This new approach uses the concept of a ‘‘character’’ to represent the status of a variant in the genome.

Commonly, binary characters have been used to represent single-nucleotide variants— that is, the variant is present or absent. In contrast, El-Kebir et al. use multi-state characters to represent copy number alterations, which may be present in zero, one, two, or more copies in the genome.

SPRUCE outperforms existing methods on simulated data, yielding higher recall rates under a variety of scenarios. Moreover, it is more robust to noise in variant allele frequency estimates, which is a significant feature of tumor genome sequencing data. Importantly, El-Kebir and colleagues demonstrate that there is often an ensemble of phylogenetic trees consistent with the underlying data. This uncertainty calls for caution in deriving definitive conclusions about the evolutionary process from a single solution.”

End Quote

 

From Original Paper

Inferring Tumor Phylogenies from Multi-region Sequencing

Zheng Hu1,2 and Christina Curtis1,2,*

1Departments of Medicine and Genetics

2Stanford Cancer Institute

Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

*Correspondence: cncurtis@stanford.edu

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cels.2016.07.007

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DISCUSSION – Genomics-driven personalized medicine for Pancreatic Cancer, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 1: Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)

DISCUSSION – Genomics-driven personalized medicine for Pancreatic Cancer

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

[bold face added, ALA]

Integrated Patient-Derived Models Delineate Individualized Therapeutic Vulnerabilities of Pancreatic Cancer –>>> Personalized Tumor Models Could Help Identify Combination Therapies for Hard-to-Treat Cancers

 

Original article

Pancreatic Cancer – Genomics-driven personalized medicine

 

PDAC has a particularly poor prognosis, and even with new targeted therapies and chemotherapy, the survival is poor. Here, we show that patient-derived models can be developed and used to investigate therapeutic sensitivities determined by genetic features of the disease and to identify empirical therapeutic vulnerabilities. These data reveal several key points that are of prime relevance to pancreatic cancer and tumor biology in general.

The Challenges of Using Genetic Analysis to Inform Treatment in PDAC

Precision oncology is dependent on the existence of known vulnerabilities encoded by high-potency genetic events and drugs capable of exploiting these vulnerabilities. At present, the repertoire of actionable genetic events in PDAC is limited.

  • Rare BRAF V600E mutations are identified in PDAC and could represent the basis for targeted inhibition, as our group and others have previously published (Collisson et al., 2012; Witkiewicz et al., 2015).

Similarly,

  • germline BRCA deficiency is the basis for ongoing poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor clinical trials (Lowery et al., 2011).

As shown here, out of 28 cases, only one genetic event was identified that yielded sensitivity to a therapeutic strategy. In this case, existence of the matched model allowed us to confirm the biological relevance of the

  • STAG2 mutation by showing sensitivity of the model to a DNA cross-linking agent.

Therefore, annotated patient-derived models provide a substrate upon which to functionally dissect the significance of novel and potentially actionable genetic events that occur within a tumor.

Another challenge of genomics-driven personalized medicine is

  • assessing the effect of specific molecular aberrations on therapeutic response in the context of complex genetic changes present in individual tumors.
  • KRAS has been proposed to modify therapeutic dependency to EZH2 inhibitors (Kim et al., 2015), and in the models tested, responses to this class of drugs were not uniformly present in cases harboring mutations in chromatin-remodeling genes.

This finding suggests that, although tumors acquire genetic alterations in specific genes, the implicated pathway may not be functionally inactive or therapeutically actionable. Therefore, annotated patient derived models provide a unique test bed for interrogating specific therapeutic dependencies in a genetically tractable system.

Empirical Definition of Therapeutic Sensitivities and Clinical Relevance

Cell lines offer the advantage of the ability to conduct high throughput approaches to interrogate many therapeutic agents. A large number of failed clinical trials have demonstrated the difficulty in treating PDAC. Based on the data herein, the paucity of clinical success is, most probably, due to the diverse therapeutic sensitivity of individual PDAC cases, suggesting that, with an unselected patient population, it will be veritably impossible to demonstrate clinical benefit. Additionally,

  •  very few models exhibited an exceptional response to single agents across the breadth of a library encompassing 305 agents.
  • We could identify only one tumor that was particularly sensitive to MEK inhibition and another model that was sensitive to
  • EGFR and
  • tyrosine kinase inhibitors.

In contrast to the limited activity of single agents, combination screens yielded responses at low-dose concentrations in the majority of models. Specific combinations were effective across several models, indicating that, by potentially screening more models, therapeutic sensitivity clades of PDAC will emerge. In the pharmacological screens performed in this study,

  • MEK inhibition, coupled with MTOR, docetaxel, or tyrosine kinase inhibitors, was effective in _30% of models tested.
  • Resistance to MEK inhibitors occurs through several mechanisms, including
  • Upregulation of oncogenic bypass signaling pathways such as AKT, tyrosine kinase, or MTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin) signaling.

In the clinic, the MEK and MTOR inhibitors (e.g., NCT02583542) are being tested. An intriguing finding from the drug screen was

  • sensitivity of a subset of models to combined MEK and docetaxel inhibition. This combination has been observed to synergistically enhance apoptosis and inhibit tumor growth in human xenograft tumor models (Balko et al., 2012; McDaid et al., 2005) and is currently being tested in a phase III study in patients with KRAS-mutated, advanced non-small-cell lung adenocarcinoma (Ja¨ nne et al., 2016).

Interestingly, in the models tested herein, there was limited sensitivity imparted through

  •  the combination of gemcitabine and MEK inhibition.

This potentially explains why the combination of MEK inhibitor and gemcitabine tested in the clinic did not show improved efficacy over gemcitabine alone (Infante et al., 2014).

Another promising strategy that emerged from this study involves using

  • CHK or BCL2 inhibitors as agents that drive enhanced sensitivity to chemotherapy.

Together, the data suggest that the majority of PDAC tumors have intrinsic therapeutic sensitivities, but the challenge is to prospectively identify effective treatment.

Patient-Derived Model-Based Approach to Precision Medicine

This study supports a path for guiding patient treatment based on the integration of genetic and empirically determined sensitivities of the patient’s tumor (Figure S7). In reference to defined genetic susceptibilities, the models provide a means to interrogate the voracity of specific drug targets. Parallel unbiased screening enables the discovery of sensitivities that could be exploited in the clinic. The model-guided treatment must be optimized, allowing for the generation of data in a time frame compatible with clinical decision making and appropriate validation.

In the present study, the majority of models were developed, cell lines were drug screened, and select hits were validated in PDX models within a 10- to 12-month window (Figure S7). This chronology would allow time to inform frontline therapy for recurrent disease for most patients who were surgically resected and treated with a standard of care where the median time to recurrence is approximately 14 months (Saif, 2013).

Although most models were generated from surgically resected specimens, two of the models (EMC3226 and EMC62) were established from primary tumor biopsies, indicating that this approach could be used with only a limited amount of tumor tissue available.

In the context of inoperable pancreatic cancer, application of data from a cell-line screen without in vivo validation in PDX would permit the generation of sensitivity data in the time frame compatible with treatment.

[We] acknowledge that model-guided treatment is also not without significant logistical hurdles, including the availability of drugs for patient treatment, clinically relevant time frames, patient-performance status, toxicity of combination regiments, and quality metrics related to model development and therapeutic response evaluation.

Additionally, it will be very important to monitor ex vivo genetic and phenotypic divergence with passage and try to understand the features of tumor heterogeneity that could undermine the efficacy of using models to direct treatment. As shown here, drug sensitivities remained stable with passage in cell culture and, importantly, were confirmed in PDX models, suggesting that the dominant genetic drivers and related therapeutic sensitivities are conserved.

In spite of these challenges, progressively more effort is going into the development of patient-derived models for guidance of disease treatment (Aparicio et al., 2015; Boj et al., 2015; Crystal et al., 2014; van de Wetering et al., 2015).

Several ongoing trials use PDX models to direct a limited repertoire of agents (e.g., NCT02312245, NCT02720796, and ERCAVATAR2015). Given the experience here, PDAC cell lines would provide the opportunity to rapidly interrogate a larger portfolio of combinations that could be used to guide patient care and provide a novel approach to precision medicine.

Validation of this approach would require the establishment of challenging multi-arm or N-of-1 clinical trials. However, considering the dire outcome for PDAC patients and the long-lasting difficulty in developing effective treatments, this non-canonical approach might be particularly impactful in pancreatic cancer.

SOURCE

Witkiewicz et al., 2016, Cell Reports 16, 1–15

August 16, 2016 ª 2016 The Author(s).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2016.07.023

Agnieszka K. WitkiewiczPress enter key for correspondence information
Uthra Balaji
Cody Eslinger
Elizabeth McMillan
William Conway
Bruce Posner
Gordon B. Mills
Eileen M. O’Reilly
Erik S. KnudsencorrespondencePress enter key for correspondence information
Publication stage: In Press Corrected Proof
Open Access

Resource Integrated Patient-Derived Models Delineate Individualized Therapeutic Vulnerabilities of Pancreatic Cancer

Correspondence

awitki@email.arizona.edu (A.K.W.),

eknudsen@email.arizona.edu (E.S.K.)

Accession Numbers: GSE84023

Other related articles on this topic published in this Open Access Online Scientific Journal include the following:

Pancreatic Cancer: Articles of Note @PharmaceuticalIntelligence.com

Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

Pancreatic Cancer: Articles of Note @PharmaceuticalIntelligence.com

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Crowdsourcing Genetic Data Yields Discovery of DNA loci associated with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) in European Descendants, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 1: Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)

Crowdsourcing Genetic Data Yields Discovery of DNA loci associated with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) in European Descendants

 

Reporter: Kelly Perlman, Life Sciences Student and Research Assistant, McGill University

 

UPDATED on 11/24/2019

Can AI help diagnose depression? It’s a long shot

At the moment, machine intelligence is just as subjective as human intelligence

Alejandra Canales

https://www.salon.com/2019/11/23/can-ai-help-diagnose-depression-its-a-long-shot_partner/amp?__twitter_impression=true

Researchers from Pfizer Global Research and Development, 23andMe, and the Massachusetts General Hospital have published a study in Nature Genetics, pinpointing 15 genetic loci associated with the risk of developing major depressive disorder (MDD) in individuals of European ancestry. Evidence from previous research suggests that MDD is heritable, but the details of the specific gene correlates are unclear. The identification of loci where single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) related to MDD exist could provide better insight into the neurobiology of depression, and therefore better treatment options.

23andMe, a private biotechnology company situated in California, offers a DNA sequencing service in which consumers send in a saliva swab for testing, and later receive a report listing the findings of the analysis related to ancestry, physical and behavioral traits, along with risk of inheriting certain diseases. The participants of this study had agreed to provide the results of their genetic testing for scientific research.

The results of 75,607 participants with self-reported diagnoses of depression were compared to the results of 231,747 participants reporting having never experienced depression. This data was combined with the results of previously published MDD genome-wide association studies (GWAS). To test the whether these results could be replicated, another set of results from 23andMe was analyzed, in which there were 45,773 MDD subjects, and 106,354 controls.

After the joint analysis, 17 SNPs were identified at 15 different loci. Tissue and gene enrichment assays showed that the genes that were over-expressed in the CNS were related to functions including neurodevelopment, histone methylation, neurogenesis and synaptic modification.

The team then created a weighted genetic risk score (GRS) in which they compared the 17 SNPs with factors including medication use, comorbid diseases and behavioral phenotypes, all of which were correlated with the GRS. Of note, the GRS was very highly correlated with age of onset of MDD.

The crowdsourcing of genetic data proves to be an efficient and powerful tool for large-scale MDD studies. Pooling large subject databases together is essential in order to account for the heterogeneous nature of the disease. Despite not being able to precisely assess each subject’s disease phenotype, scientists can make more rapid headway by collaborating with biotechnology companies in the quest to better understand the biological mechanisms of depression. Ron Perlis, M.D., M.Sc., of the Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of this paper explained that “finding genes associated with depression should help make clear that this is a brain disease, which we hope will decrease the stigma still associated with these kinds of illnesses”.

 

Details on specific significant genes:

http://www.genecards.org/cgi-bin/carddisp.pl?gene=OLFM4

http://www.genecards.org/cgi-bin/carddisp.pl?gene=TMEM161B

http://www.genecards.org/cgi-bin/carddisp.pl?gene=MEF2C

http://www.genecards.org/cgi-bin/carddisp.pl?gene=MEIS2

http://www.genecards.org/cgi-bin/carddisp.pl?gene=TMCO5A

http://www.genecards.org/cgi-bin/carddisp.pl?gene=NEGR1

 

SOURCES

Hyde, C. L., Nagle, M. W., Tian, C., Chen, X., Paciga, S. A., Wendland, J. R., . . . Winslow, A. R. (2016). Identification of 15 genetic loci associated with risk of major depression in individuals of European descent. Nature Genetics Nat Genet. doi:10.1038/ng.3623

Major Depressive Disorder Loci Discovered in Large GWAS Enabled by 23andMe Participants’ Data. (2016, August 01). Retrieved August 09, 2016, from https://www.genomeweb.com/microarrays-multiplexing/major-depressive-disorder-loci-discovered-large-gwas-enabled-23andme

 

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Through Data Science: Stanford Medicine and Google will transform Patient Care and Medical Research, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 1: Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)

 Through Data Science: Stanford Medicine and Google will transform Patient Care and Medical Research

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

 

Stanford Medicine integrates research, medical education and health care at its three institutions –Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Health Care (formerly Stanford Hospital & Clinics), and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. For more information, please visit the Office of Communication & Public Affairs site at http://mednews.stanford.edu.

 

Stanford’s forthcoming Clinical Genomics Service, which puts genomic sequencing into the hands of clinicians to help diagnose disease, will be built using Google Genomics, a service that applies the same technologies that power Google Search and Maps to securely store, process, explore and share genomic data sets.

The Clinical Genomics Service will enable physicians at Stanford Health Care and Stanford Children’s Health to order genome sequencing for patients who have distinctive or unusual symptoms that might be caused by a wayward gene. The genomic data would then go to the Google Cloud Platform to join masses of aggregated and anonymous data from other Stanford patients. “As the new service launches,” said Euan Ashley, MRCP, DPhil, a Stanford associate professor of medicine and of genetics, “we’ll be doing hundreds and then thousands of genome sequences.”

The Clinical Genomics Service aims to make genetic testing a normal part of health care for patients. “Genetic testing is built into the whole system,” said Ashley. A physician who thinks a genome-sequencing test could help a patient can simply request sequencing along with other blood tests, he said. “The DNA gets sequenced and a large amount of data comes back,” he said. At that point, Stanford can use Google Cloud to analyze the data to decide which gene variants might be responsible for the patient’s health condition. Then a data curation team will work with the physician to narrow the possibilities, he said.

“This collaboration will enable Stanford to discover new ways to advance medicine to the benefit of Stanford patients and families,” said Ed Kopetsky, chief information officer at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford and Stanford Children’s Health. “Together, Stanford Medicine and Google are making a major contribution and commitment in curing diseases that afflict children not just in our community, but throughout the world. It’s an extraordinary investment, and we’re proud to play such a large role in transforming patient care and research.”

Read more at the SOURCE

 

Stanford Medicine, Google team up to harness power of data science for health care

By JENNIE DUSHECK

Jennie Dusheck is a science writer for the medical school’s Office of Communication & Public Affairs. Email her at dusheck@stanford.edu.
SOURCE

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CancerBase.org – The Global HUB for Diagnoses, Genomes, Pathology Images: A Real-time Diagnosis and Therapy Mapping Service for Cancer Patients – Anonymized Medical Records accessible to anyone on Earth, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 1: Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)

CancerBase.org – The Global HUB for Diagnoses, Genomes, Pathology Images: A Real-time Diagnosis and Therapy Mapping Service for Cancer Patients – Anonymized Medical Records accessible to anyone on Earth

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

 

UPDATED on 10/29/2019

Pan-cancer computational histopathology reveals mutations, tumor composition and prognosis

Yu Fu1, Alexander W Jung1, Ramon Viñas Torne1, Santiago Gonzalez1,2, Harald Vöhringer1, Mercedes Jimenez-Linan3, Luiza Moore3,4, and Moritz Gerstung#1,5 # to whom correspondence should be addressed 1) European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Hinxton, UK. 2) Current affiliation: Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), Parc Científic de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. 3) Department of Pathology, Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, UK. 4) Wellcome Sanger Institute, Hinxton, UK 5) European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Genome Biology Unit, Heidelberg, Germany.

Correspondence:

Dr Moritz Gerstung European Molecular Biology Laboratory European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) Hinxton, CB10 1SA UK. Tel: +44 (0) 1223 494636 E-mail: moritz.gerstung@ebi.ac.uk

Abstract

Pan-cancer computational histopathology reveals mutations, tumor composition and prognosis

Here we use deep transfer learning to quantify histopathological patterns across 17,396 H&E stained histopathology image slides from 28 cancer types and correlate these with underlying genomic and transcriptomic data. Pan-cancer computational histopathology (PC-CHiP) classifies the tissue origin across organ sites and provides highly accurate, spatially resolved tumor and normal distinction within a given slide. The learned computational histopathological features correlate with a large range of recurrent genetic aberrations, including whole genome duplications (WGDs), arm-level copy number gains and losses, focal amplifications and deletions as well as driver gene mutations within a range of cancer types. WGDs can be predicted in 25/27 cancer types (mean AUC=0.79) including those that were not part of model training. Similarly, we observe associations with 25% of mRNA transcript levels, which enables to learn and localise histopathological patterns of molecularly defined cell types on each slide. Lastly, we find that computational histopathology provides prognostic information augmenting histopathological subtyping and grading in the majority of cancers assessed, which pinpoints prognostically relevant areas such as necrosis or infiltrating lymphocytes on each tumour section. Taken together, these findings highlight the large potential of PC-CHiP to discover new molecular and prognostic associations, which can augment diagnostic workflows and lay out a rationale for integrating molecular and histopathological data.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/813543v1

 

Key points

● Pan-cancer computational histopathology analysis with deep learning extracts histopathological patterns and accurately discriminates 28 cancer and 14 normal tissue types

● Computational histopathology predicts whole genome duplications, focal amplifications and deletions, as well as driver gene mutations

● Wide-spread correlations with gene expression indicative of immune infiltration and proliferation

● Prognostic information augments conventional grading and histopathology subtyping in the majority of cancers

 

Discussion

Here we presented PC-CHiP, a pan-cancer transfer learning approach to extract computational histopathological features across 42 cancer and normal tissue types and their genomic, molecular and prognostic associations. Histopathological features, originally derived to classify different tissues, contained rich histologic and morphological signals predictive of a range of genomic and transcriptomic changes as well as survival. This shows that computer vision not only has the capacity to highly accurately reproduce predefined tissue labels, but also that this quantifies diverse histological patterns, which are predictive of a broad range of genomic and molecular traits, which were not part of the original training task. As the predictions are exclusively based on standard H&E-stained tissue sections, our analysis highlights the high potential of computational histopathology to digitally augment existing histopathological workflows. The strongest genomic associations were found for whole genome duplications, which can in part be explained by nuclear enlargement and increased nuclear intensities, but seemingly also stems from tumour grade and other histomorphological patterns contained in the high-dimensional computational histopathological features. Further, we observed associations with a range of chromosomal gains and losses, focal deletions and amplifications as well as driver gene mutations across a number of cancer types. These data demonstrate that genomic alterations change the morphology of cancer cells, as in the case of WGD, but possibly also that certain aberrations preferentially occur in distinct cell types, reflected by the tumor histology. Whatever is the cause or consequence in this equation, these associations lay out a route towards genomically defined histopathology subtypes, which will enhance and refine conventional assessment. Further, a broad range of transcriptomic correlations was observed reflecting both immune cell infiltration and cell proliferation that leads to higher tumor densities. These examples illustrated the remarkable property that machine learning does not only establish novel molecular associations from pre-computed histopathological feature sets but also allows the localisation of these traits within a larger image. While this exemplifies the power of a large scale data analysis to detect and localise recurrent patterns, it is probably not superior to spatially annotated training data. Yet such data can, by definition, only be generated for associations which are known beforehand. This appears straightforward, albeit laborious, for existing histopathology classifications, but more challenging for molecular readouts. Yet novel spatial transcriptomic44,45 and sequencing technologies46 bring within reach spatially matched molecular and histopathological data, which would serve as a gold standard in combining imaging and molecular patterns. Across cancer types, computational histopathological features showed a good level of prognostic relevance, substantially improving prognostic accuracy over conventional grading and histopathological subtyping in the majority of cancers. It is this very remarkable that such predictive It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license. (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. bioRxiv preprint first posted online Oct. 25, 2019; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/813543. The copyright holder for this preprint signals can be learned in a fully automated fashion. Still, at least at the current resolution, the improvement over a full molecular and clinical workup was relatively small. This might be a consequence of the far-ranging relations between histopathology and molecular phenotypes described here, implying that histopathology is a reflection of the underlying molecular alterations rather than an independent trait. Yet it probably also highlights the challenges of unambiguously quantifying histopathological signals in – and combining signals from – individual areas, which requires very large training datasets for each tumour entity. From a methodological point of view, the prediction of molecular traits can clearly be improved. In this analysis, we adopted – for the reason of simplicity and to avoid overfitting – a transfer learning approach in which an existing deep convolutional neural network, developed for classification of everyday objects, was fine tuned to predict cancer and normal tissue types. The implicit imaging feature representation was then used to predict molecular traits and outcomes. Instead of employing this two-step procedure, which risks missing patterns irrelevant for the initial classification task, one might directly employ either training on the molecular trait of interest, or ideally multi-objective learning. Further improvement may also be related to the choice of the CNN architecture. Everyday images have no defined scale due to a variable z-dimension; therefore, the algorithms need to be able to detect the same object at different sizes. This clearly is not the case for histopathology slides, in which one pixel corresponds to a defined physical size at a given magnification. Therefore, possibly less complex CNN architectures may be sufficient for quantitative histopathology analyses, and also show better generalisation. Here, in our proof-of-concept analysis, we observed a considerable dependence of the feature representation on known and possibly unknown properties of our training data, including the image compression algorithm and its parameters. Some of these issues could be overcome by amending and retraining the network to isolate the effect of confounding factors and additional data augmentation. Still, given the flexibility of deep learning algorithms and the associated risk of overfitting, one should generally be cautious about the generalisation properties and critically assess whether a new image is appropriately represented. Looking forward, our analyses revealed the enormous potential of using computer vision alongside molecular profiling. While the eye of a trained human may still constitute the gold standard for recognising clinically relevant histopathological patterns, computers have the capacity to augment this process by sifting through millions of images to retrieve similar patterns and establish associations with known and novel traits. As our analysis showed this helps to detect histopathology patterns associated with a range of genomic alterations, transcriptional signatures and prognosis – and highlight areas indicative of these traits on each given slide. It is therefore not too difficult to foresee how this may be utilised in a computationally augmented histopathology workflow enabling more precise and faster diagnosis and prognosis. Further, the ability to quantify a rich set of histopathology patterns lays out a path to define integrated histopathology and molecular cancer subtypes, as recently demonstrated for colorectal cancers47 .

Lastly, our analyses provide It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license. (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.

bioRxiv preprint first posted online Oct. 25, 2019; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/813543.

The copyright holder for this preprint proof-of-concept for these principles and we expect them to be greatly refined in the future based on larger training corpora and further algorithmic refinements.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/10/25/813543.full.pdf

 

July 27, 2016
world map illustration
Illustration by Tricia Seibold and iStock/liuzishan

During his 2016 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama called on Vice President Joe Biden – who had months earlier lost his son Beau to brain cancer – to head a “moonshot” to significantly accelerate research into the disease. The president said he wanted to harness the spirit of American innovation that took us from zero to landing a man on the moon in a decade to similarly find new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer.

One of those intrigued by that call to action was Stanford’s Jan Liphardt, an associate professor of bioengineering who specializes in biophysics, the tumor microenvironment and data analysis. Stanford Engineering talked to Liphardt about how he came to be involved with the moonshot and his approach to using data and the voice of patients to better understand cancer and how it can be treated, and how sharing information can better inform the course of cancer research.

How did you get involved in the National Cancer Moonshot?

In March, after the president’s charge, the vice president challenged scientists, doctors, industry and patients to give their best ideas to the moonshot. The White House also reached out to a few outsiders, myself included. The White House instructions were unusual: “Do something big and different. There is no money and you have 87 days. Go.”

I like a challenge, and this was a chance to serve, even in the face of administrative hurdles. So I looked for advice, teammates and support. Russ Altman, a colleague at Stanford, suggested it was time to give patients a way to volunteer their own health data in order to help find cures. I collaborated with Peter Kuhn, a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California, who’s known for carefully listening to cancer patients, advocates and their supporters. In short order we had links with advocates like AnneMarie Ciccarella, Sonja Durham, Lori Marx-Rubiner, Jack Whelan and Jack Park. That’s how we got to CancerBase.org.

What’s the idea the team came up with?

We thought for about a week: What would matter to the patients that Stanford and other research institutions serve? What would scale? Well, we’re not going to run a clinical trial, go near protected health information, invent a new drug or write a research proposal. There’s no time for that. Whatever it was, it had to be useful, scalable, legal and different. That pointed to data, the web, patients and decisions.

One thing jumped out: Right now, there’s significant friction in medical data sharing. People all over the world can already effortlessly share other kinds of information – pictures, movies, ideas, stories, tweets. Increasingly, they are using the same tools to share personal medical information. It’s remarkable what cancer patients already share: diagnoses, genomes, pathology images. But that information is not yet widely used to understand where they are with their diseases.

Ideally, everyone, including scientists and doctors, would have as much information as possible at their fingertips. Many patients think when they give data for research, magically scientists all over the world can dig into this information, find patterns and help. The practical reality is that it’s nearly impossible for any one scientist to access the amounts of data they would like.

So that’s the simple idea: A global map and give patients the tools they need to share their data – if they want to. They can donate information for the greater good. In return, we make a simple promise: When you post data, we’ll anonymize them and make them available to anyone on Earth in one second. We plan to display this information like real-time traffic data. HIPAA doesn’t apply to this direct data-sharing. The patients can give us whatever information they want, and they can tell us what they want us to do with it. We’re a conduit. Their data belong to them, not to us.

How does it work?

Today we ask just five basic questions. Over time we will add more. You join, give some information, and we’ll put you on a global map. Right now, some of the things we don’t know about cancer are incredibly simple: Where is everyone on Earth with cancer? How old are they? What is their diagnosis? Did their cancers metastasize? Global, instantaneous data sharing is the story.

In a second phase, we are going to see if we can plot all the information just like Waze does for traffic. Our role is to synthesize the information and plot it in ways that ordinary people can understand. Think of it this way – patients want to be able to chart their treatment path. Who went straight, who went left? People just getting on the highway are curious about what people did who came before them, and what happened to those people. Did they arrive at the destination easily and promptly? We’re a real-time diagnosis and therapy mapping service for cancer.

You say that giving patients a way to share their health data is important to help finding cures. Why?

Let me give you a specific example. At Stanford, I’m part of a team of cancer biologists and clinicians funded by the Stanford Cancer Institute to think about the next generation of screening for breast cancer in the U.S. Every year, the U.S. uses mammography to screen more than 40 million women for breast cancer. In this project, it quickly became clear that there is currently no central, easy-to-access repository of mammograms for research use.

That’s a major lost opportunity – our nation spends billions on screening, but we don’t store, share and analyze this information in a scalable and simple manner. In the traditional approach, our team would spend several hundred thousand dollars, and about three years, to assemble perhaps 1,000 mammograms. We would then use this tiny dataset to try to find something interesting, but since the dataset is so small, we would be blind to rare features of breast cancer and its predictors. It clearly makes a lot more sense to compare and explore 100 million images.

This sounds completely impossible until you realize that Instagram users upload 58 million images every day. Once you start to think about supposedly intractable research problems from a web or social networking perspective, new possibilities open. Imagine, for example, if there were a simple way for every single woman on Earth to upload and share her de-identified mammogram? Or more generally, imagine a world in which patients have the tools to globally share de-identified health data, if they want to. That’s exactly the idea behind CancerBase – let’s just give people those tools and see what happens.

How much data and how many people are needed to make this viable?

We think we are going to need several tens-of-thousands of members. There are approximately 50 million people on Earth with a cancer diagnosed in the last five years, and 200 million more people have an immediate family member with cancer. Almost 2 billion people are active on Twitter and Facebook – a quarter of the world’s population. If just a few percent of those people sign up, we could do something no one on Earth has done before.

Are there hopes to create a “developer community,” people who find ways to use your data that you didn’t even think about or have the time to work on?

Definitely. As much as we think we can predict what these data are useful for, we don’t really know. By making the anonymized data available to everyone within one second, they might start to do things that we never dreamed of. The more eyes look at these data, the better off everyone will be. The dream is to have cancer-relevant medical data flow unimpeded around the world in seconds, so that everyone, wherever they are, can see and use this information.

SOURCE

https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/how-data-can-help-us-understand-cancer-and-its-treatment

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A New Potential Target for Pancreatic Cancer Treatment: Rapid Screening Technique finds Gene Defending Tumors from DNA Damage @M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 1: Next Generation Sequencing (NGS)

A New Potential Target for Pancreatic Cancer Treatment: Rapid Screening Technique finds Gene Defending Tumors from DNA Damage @M. D. Anderson Cancer Center

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

Novel gene-hunting method implicates new culprit in pancreatic cancer

Researchers develop rapid screening technique; find gene defends tumors from DNA damage

Date:
June 23, 2016
Source:
University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Summary:
Using an innovative approach to identify a cancer’s genetic vulnerabilities by more swiftly analyzing human tumors transplanted into mice, researchers have identified a new potential target for pancreatic cancer treatment.

WDR5 emerges as robust “hit”

WD repeat-containing protein 5 (WDR5), a core part of the COMPASS complex regulating chromatin function, was implicated in multiple screens. Recent research by others had shown WDR5 to be upregulated in prostate and bladder cancers and critical for cancer cell proliferation.

The team confirmed WDR5 was highly expressed in pancreatic cancer compared to normal pancreas tissue and then conducted a series of experiments which showed knocking down the gene impaired cell proliferation and tumor growth and greatly increased survival in mice.

Subsequent experiments showed WDR5 works in concert with Myc to protect pancreatic cancer from DNA damage. There is no known method for targeting either WDR5 or Myc separately, Carugo said, but the team thinks there might be ways to block their interaction.

While the team targeted epigenetic regulators, Carugo noted the technique can be used with other shRNA libraries aimed at different classes of genes.

This technology is being widely adopted by MD Anderson’s moon shot teams to identify genetic vulnerabilities and cancer targets specific to various disease subtypes.


Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

SOURCE

University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. “Novel gene-hunting method implicates new culprit in pancreatic cancer: Researchers develop rapid screening technique; find gene defends tumors from DNA damage.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 23 June 2016. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160623115741.htm.

Alessandro Carugo et al. In Vivo Functional Platform Targeting Patient-Derived Xenografts Identifies WDR5-Myc Association as a Critical Determinant of Pancreatic Cancer. Cell Reports, June 2016 DOI:10.1016/j.celrep.2016.05.063

Cell Rep. 2016 Jun 28;16(1):133-47. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2016.05.063. Epub 2016 Jun 16.

In Vivo Functional Platform Targeting Patient-Derived Xenografts Identifies WDR5-Myc Association as a Critical Determinant of Pancreatic Cancer.

Author information

  • 1Department of Genomic Medicine, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Department of Molecular and Cellular Oncology, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Department of Experimental Oncology, European Institute of Oncology, Milan 20139, Italy. Electronic address: acarugo@mdanderson.org.
  • 2Department of Genomic Medicine, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Department of Molecular and Cellular Oncology, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
  • 3Institute for Applied Cancer Science, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
  • 4Department of Experimental Oncology, European Institute of Oncology, Milan 20139, Italy.
  • 5Department of Genomic Medicine, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
  • 6Sheikh Ahmed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
  • 7Department of Epigenetics and Molecular Carcinogenesis, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
  • 8Department of Experimental Oncology, European Institute of Oncology, Milan 20139, Italy; Department of Oncology and Hemato-oncology, University of Milan, Milan 20139, Italy.
  • 9Center for Genomic Science of IIT@SEMM, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Milan 20139, Italy.
  • 10Department of Genomic Medicine, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Institute for Applied Cancer Science, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
  • 11Department of Surgical Oncology, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
  • 12Department of Pathology, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
  • 13Department of Cancer Biology, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
  • 14Department of Experimental Oncology, European Institute of Oncology, Milan 20139, Italy. Electronic address: luisa.lanfrancone@ieo.eu.
  • 15C-4 Therapeutics, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA. Electronic address: theffernan@c4therapeutics.com.
  • 16Department of Genomic Medicine, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Institute for Applied Cancer Science, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Department of Molecular and Cellular Oncology, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA. Electronic address: gdraetta@mdanderson.org.

Abstract

Current treatment regimens for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) yield poor 5-year survival, emphasizing the critical need to identify druggable targets essential for PDAC maintenance. We developed an unbiased and in vivo target discovery approach to identify molecular vulnerabilities in low-passage and patient-derived PDAC xenografts or genetically engineered mouse model-derived allografts. Focusing on epigenetic regulators, we identified WDR5, a core member of the COMPASS histone H3 Lys4 (H3K4) MLL (1-4) methyltransferase complex, as a top tumor maintenance hit required across multiple human and mouse tumors. Mechanistically, WDR5 functions to sustain proper execution of DNA replication in PDAC cells, as previously suggested by replication stress studies involving MLL1, and c-Myc, also found to interact with WDR5. We indeed demonstrate that interaction with c-Myc is critical for this function. By showing that ATR inhibition mimicked the effects of WDR5 suppression, these data provide rationale to test ATR and WDR5 inhibitors for activity in this disease.

Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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