Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Inferring drug effects on cancer evolution and heterogeneity: from bulk to single cells

Shaon Chakrabarti

Harvard University and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

It has long been recognized that cancer is an evolutionary
process analogous to the Darwinian evolution of species, albeit over
much shorter time scales. With the advent of high throughput
technologies and our rapidly increasing ability to zoom into the
human (epi)genome, there is renewed excitement in leveraging the
rules of evolution to unravel the fundamental principles of cancer
and eventually design optimal treatment strategies. I will
present my research on predicting novel clinical strategies for
combining targeted therapies in non-small cell lung cancer, using an
evolutionary model based on bulk assays of cancer cells. I will also
present a new algorithm we are currently developing to harness the
power of single-cell lineage tracking experiments, to characterize
therapy-induced heterogeneity in cancer cells that would lead to
more accurate evolutionary models of cancer progression.