DR-326 Cancer evolutionary dynamics

Cancers change over time. Understanding how cancers change is important for determining a patient’s prognosis and to improve the effectiveness of treatment. It is not possible to directly watch a cancer change, and so instead we have to infer the changes using the patterns of mutations across the cancer genome. These mutational patterns are analogous to the rings inside a tree trunk that are a ’secret diary’ of how the tree grew. We have developed mathematical tools to read the patterns and work out how cancers grow and change, and we apply these tools to study the rich data within the Hartwig dataset.

Trevor Graham, The Institute of Cancer Research, United Kingdom