Biology

Dr. Shaon Chakraborty
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.