Abstract

Making Sense of Cancer Evolution with Next Generation Sequencing

Anthony Papenfuss, Head, Bioinformatics and Cancer Genomics Laboratory, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

Cancer is a genetic disease in populations of cells that is underpinned by evolution and selection. Tumorigenesis, disease progression, metastasis, and the emergence of heterogeneity and therapy resistance are all evolutionary processes. Dramatic decreases in the costs of sequencing genomes have enabled new deep insights into these processes. In this talk, I will discuss some of our own experiences investigating tumour evolution focused on two examples.

In the first and conceptually simpler example, we sequenced primary melanomas and multiple metastases obtained from a rapid autopsies. We have used these data to infer the evolution of melanoma metastases. I will briefly describe what we have learnt, and some of the roadblocks to understanding and how we are trying to overcome these.

In the second example, we sequenced DNA from flow isolated cancer-associated neo-chromosome