Modeling cancer evolution: integrating theory with experiment

Modeling cancer evolution: integrating theory with experiment

  • Date: Jun 15, 2020
  • Time: 04:30 PM - 05:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Dr. Christopher McFarland, Stanford University, CA, USA
  • please see https://profiles.stanford.edu/christopher-mcfarland
  • Location: virtuelle Plattform
  • Host: Paul Rainey

Tumor progression is a stochastic, evolutionary processes. Understanding cancer's evolutionary dynamics is critical to deciphering cancer genomes, and to developing robust therapeutic strategies. In this talk, I will interrogate three outstanding questions in the field: why do non-adaptive passenger mutations accumulate in conserved regions of the human genome, what are the fitness effects of drivers and can their rare occurrence explain why most tumors fail to progress to cancer, and to what extend does epistasis constrain tumor progression? The answers to all of these questions are addressed by integrating theoretical modeling, statistical genomics, and *in vivo *experimentation. I will also discuss future efforts to more quantitatively model and measure the spatio-temporal dynamics of competing clones within a mouse tumor. if you are interested in participating, please contact Britta Baron for link and password: baron@evolbio.mpg.de.

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