Please join us for a live webinar on the 3rd February 15.00–16.00 at which Professor Axel Behrens (Cancer Research UK Convergence Science Centre Scientific Director) is pleased to host Dr Rachael Natrajan and Dr Marina Evangelou.

In this series of webinars brought to you by the Cancer Research UK Convergence Science Centre at Imperial College London and The Institute of Cancer Research, London, researchers across the two organisations will discuss key challenges facing cancer research and opportunities for new convergence science approaches to address these. Join us to consider how novel approaches and technologies could shed light on unresolved problems in cancer biology, to innovate new ways to address challenges in cancer and bring pioneering treatments to cancer patients faster.

 

 

Dr Rachael Natrajan – Division of Breast Cancer Research, The Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust

 

“Identifying and targeting sub-clonal heterogeneity underlying metastatic progression of breast cancer”

 

Despite new systemic treatment advances, metastatic breast cancer is still an incurable disease and a major cause of cancer related deaths. To date, evidence suggests that the intrinsic molecular plasticity of breast cancer cells, the sub-clonal heterogeneity of tumours and interactions between the tumour and the local microenvironment act together to determine the response to treatment. I will describe efforts in our lab to identify novel driver genomic alterations that contribute to the sub-clonal heterogeneity in cancer cells, and how we are using single cell profiling approaches together with functional-genomic screens to characterise their effects on breast cancer progression and to identify new therapeutic approaches for these subgroups of patients.

 

 &

 

Dr Marina Evangelou – Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London

 

“Multi-SNE, an approach for the visualization, clustering and classification of multiple datasets”

 

Recent biomedical studies generate multiple OMICS for the same individuals, for example transcriptomics and proteomics. Researchers are interested in understanding the relationships between the OMICS datasets and with the complex traits, including diseases of interest. In this talk, I will present how we have adapted the well-known single-dataset visualisation approach Student's t-distributed Stochastic Neighbour Embedding (t-SNE) for the visualisation of multiple datasets that are generated on the same individuals. I will further show how the outcome of the proposed multi-SNE approach can be used for the clustering and classification of the samples of the study ^[1-2]. 

 

[1] Rodosthenous, Shahrezaei, Evangelou, Multi-view Data visualisation via manifold learning, arXiv:2101.06763 

[2] Rodosthenous, Shahrezaei, Evangelou, S-multi-SNE: Semi-supervised classification and visuallisation of multi-view data, arXiv:2111.03519  

 

 

About the speakers:

 

 

Dr Rachael Natrajan

Dr Natrajan is a team leader within the Division of Breast Cancer Research at the Institute of Cancer Research and has a strong background in molecular pathology. Her lab is interested in characterising, identifying, and functionally exploiting the sub-clonal heterogeneity of treatment resistant breast cancer disease to identify biomarkers and novel therapeutic strategies to translate into proof-of-concept clinical trials.

 

 

Dr Marina Evangelou

Dr Evangelou is a Senior Lecturer in the Statistics Section of the Department of Mathematics. She is interested in the development of statistical and machine learning methods for addressing biomedical problems. Her most recent work involves the development of methods for data integration and variable selection. Dr Evangelou has extensive experience in the fields of genetic epidemiology and bioinformatics, where she has worked on the development of methods for pathway analysis of genome-wide association data.  

 

 

 

Registration

 

To receive information about how to access this event please email icr-imperial-convergence.centre@imperial.ac.uk

 

Please note: This webinar is exclusively available only to colleagues across the Institute of Cancer Research, Imperial College London, the Royal Marsden Hospital and Imperial College Healthcare.