Regensburg Lectures in Medical Bioinformatics

Introduction

I will talk about two probabilistic models that we develop for cancer. The first deals with mutual exclusivity of cancer mutations. Mutually exclusive mutations in a set of genes indicate that the genes play a role in a common cancer process. I will present a fully probabilistic, generative model of mutual exclusivity, explicitly taking interpretable parameters of coverage and impurity, as well as error rates into account. Our statistical modeling framework provides increased flexibility and power to detect cancer pathways from genomic alteration data in the presence of noise.

In a second project that I will present, we model the initial growth of metastatic colonies. Metastases arise when cancer cells spread from their primary tumor of origin to distant organs, where they initiate new tumors. However, only a tiny fraction of disseminating tumor cells succeeds in establishing a stable colony. We study the rate-limiting step of metastasis initiation in a quantitative fashion using a size-dependent branching process model. Our model adds to a systematic understanding of metastasis formation and may help defining medical intervention strategies.

Tuesday, 01.07.2014, 4 p.m.

in H46 Chemie

Host: Prof. Dr. Rainer Spang