Cancer Program

The Cancer Genome Computational Analysis (CGCA) group — a central component of the Ó³»­´«Ã½â€™s Cancer Program — addresses unanswered questions of cancer biology and genomics through the development of computational methods and tools, in conjunction with platforms, datasets and resources. Specifically, the group works to understand cancer by characterizing and interpreting genomic data:

User-friendly, web-based entry point to downloadable TCGA datasets, summary reports, and graphical tools.  FireBrowse sits atop TCGA GDAC Firehose, an application providing access to TCGA datasets and a robust selection of tools and pipelines for analyzing cancer genome data, as well as thousands of data analysis archives.

ABSOLUTE can estimate purity/ploidy, and from that compute absolute copy-number and mutation multiplicities.

A cancer cell can also harbor thousands of structural variants — large-scale losses (deletions), duplications, swaps (translocations), and other changes — in its DNA. Matthew Meyerson and Rameen Beroukhim of the Ó³»­´«Ã½ Cancer Program and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute discuss the challenges to studying structural variations in cancer, why it is important to do so, and what researchers are learning that could benefit patients today and in the future.

The study of structural variation — large-scale changes in DNA that can, in some cases, refashion entire chromosomes — in the genomic era has lagged behind that of sequence variation. But there’s a growing appreciation of how important structural variants are to human biology and disease. What makes these variants more challenging to study, and what is being done to overcome those challenges?

Corrie Painter, associate director of operations and scientific outreach at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and one of the creators of The Metastatic Breast Cancer Project, and Eliezer Van Allen, an oncologist at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and an associate member at Ó³»­´«Ã½, discuss patient engagement, which is critical for advancing our understanding of both common and rare cancers and empowering people to get in the driver's seat of clinical research.