Introduced by: Janet Kelso, ISCB Treasurer; Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
Time: Thursday, July 14, 2022 at 8:30 AM - 9:30 AM CDT (Live Stream)
Room: Madison Ballroom ABCD (Level Four, Monona Terrace)

Presentation Title: Comprehensive identification of cancer driver mutations

Abstract

Somatic mutations are the driving force of cancer genome evolution. Given the evolutionary principles of cancer, one effective way to identify cancer genes is by tracing the signals left by the positive selection of driver mutations across tumours. Using this concept we analyze thousands of tumor genomes to generate a compendium of cancer genes across tumor types (http://www.intogen.org), and we build machine learning models inspired in evolutionary biology that effectively identify driver mutations in each gene and cancer type (http://www.intogen.org/boostdm). The results (integrated in  CancerGenomeInterpreter.org) contribute to the interpretation of tumor mutations in precision cancer medicine.

Biography

Nuria Lopez­-Bigas is an ICREA Research Professor at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona. She is interested in the identification of cancer driver mutations, genes and pathways across tumor types and in understanding the mutational processes leading to the accumulation of mutations in cancer cells. Her lab (http://bbglab.irbbarcelona.org) combines strong expertise in biology and bioinformatics. They are the developers of IntOGen.org, a compendium of cancer genes across cancer types, and of CGI (cancergenomeinterpreter.org), a tool to annotate cancer driver mutations and biomarkers of drug response in individual tumors. Nuria Lopez­-Bigas was elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2016 and Fellow of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2021.