April - Mathieu Lajoie, Tariq Daouda, Nicolas De Jay¶
Event Details
Date/Time:
Wednesday, April 1st, 2015 16h00 - 18h00
Schedule:
16h00 — Introduction and open floor for announcements/questions/comments – Alexis Blanchet-Cohen, IRCM
16h15 — Mathieu Lajoie, PhD (CHU Ste-Justine) — "Personalized Targeted Therapy for Refractory Childhood Cancers"
17h00 — Break (Snacks and beverages)
17h15 — Tariq Daouda (IRIC) — "PyGeno: A Python package for Personalized Medicine and Proteogenomics"
17h45 — Nicolas De Jay (Lady Davis Institute) — "Everything you've ever wanted to know about Git"
We'd like to thank everyone for another great meeting on April 1st: the speakers, our sponsors (especially our new sponsor, the McGill Department of Human Genetics), the attendees, and all the people working behind the scenes to ensure MonBUG's success.
The bigger auditorium got positive reviews, so that will now be our default room. We have space for 150, so don't be shy about inviting all your colleagues and friends to come.
We deliberately keep our meetings short, but everyone is welcome to stay after the meeting to continue the discussion around some drinks and food.
Keynote Speaker: Mathieu Lajoie, PhD
Affiliation: CHU Ste-Justine
Talk Title: Personalized Targeted Therapy for Refractory Childhood Cancers
Abstract:
In Canada, about 1500 pediatric cancers are diagnosed each year. Despite improvements in risk-based treatment protocols, ~20% of childhood cancer patients do not respond to current therapies and ultimately succumb to their disease, urging the need for new and more effective therapeutic approaches. Since individual tumours of the same clinical type harbour diverse sets of genomic alterations that drive oncogenesis and modulate drug response, personalized targeted therapy based on next generation sequencing may be a key to increase curerates and decrease treatment-related morbidity and mortality.
In this project, we implemented an automated pipeline to identify single nucleotide variants, indels, gene fusions, and copy number variations from DNA and RNA sequencing data. We use Perl wrappers to encapsulate well-established softwares (e.g. Bowtie2, STAR, PicardTools) and connect them using a common interface. Our goal is to detect prognostic markers and drug-actionable targets in a rapid and standardized way, going from biopsy to detailed tumour analysis within a clinically-relevant timeframe. Actionable variations are validated by re-sequencing or qPCR, detailed in a report with supportive information and communicated to the physician. Preliminary results on 10 cases indicate the feasibility and great potential of our approach; indeed, the final report can be in the treating oncologist's hands in less than 8 weeks. This represents a first step towards the implementation of a targeted therapy program for children with relapse or refractory cancer.
Speaker: Tariq Daouda
Affiliation: IRIC
Talk Title: PyGeno: A Python package for Personalized Medicine and Proteogenomics
Speaker: Nicolas De Jay
Affiliation: Lady Davis Institute
Talk Title: Everything you've ever wanted to know about Git
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