Kasper will present the lab’s work, and the work of collaborators from the Accelerating Medicines Partnership in Type 2 Diabetes (Mark McCarthy, Rob Sladek, Anna Gloyn, Chad Cowan, and Jose Florez) at this meeting on the NIH campus April 23rd.

The event will take place in Boston April 23 – 25 and the overarching theme is artificial intelligence in medicine and healthcare.

The full program can be found here: https://worldmedicalinnovation.org/

Anika Gupta, who has been an MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program researcher in the lab for 2 years, was recently accepted into the PhD programs of Harvard (Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics), Harvard-MIT (Health Sciences and Technology), and Stanford Medicine (Biomedical Informatics). Anika was co-supervised with Aviv Regev.

Congratulations Anika – we couldn’t be more proud of you and wish you the very best of luck as a graduate student!!!

February 8, 2018

Kasper spoke on his labs approaches in integrative analyses of genetic datasets in the session ‘Integrative Analysis, Dynamic Networks and Systems Immunology’ and chaired the session ‘Immuno-Oncology from Basic Science to Clinical Practice’

For full program click here.

Heiko Horn presenting his work ‘NetSig: Network-based discovery from cancer genomes’ at the weekly meeting of the GPP at the Broad Institute:

THE AUTHOR FILE by Vivien Marx:

Scoring genes in light of their ‘friends’, and a naval approach to science

The profile can be accessed here as a virtual pdf file and on the Nature Methods website here.

Kasper Lage was involved in a general discussion regarding a new Danish National Genome Center, featured on the front page of the well-respected Danish newspaper ‘Weekendavisen’, in two articles in Ingenioren and in an interview on Danish National Radio. Kasper was also featured in Nature Methods, in a profile titled “Scoring Genes in Light of Their ‘Friends’, a Naval Approach to Science”.

From the lab Heiko Horn led the development and implementation of network-based statistic that identifies cancer driver genes with high accuracy from cancer genomes. Results are validated using a massively parallel in vivo tumorigenesis assay in mice and by re-analyzing 660 lung adenocarcinoma patients where ~1/3 do not have mutations or copy number changes in known oncogenes identifying two new cancer-driving genes underlying this cancer type.

This project is a collaboration with Jesse Boehm and Gad Getz from the Broad Institute and MGH Cancer Center.

Paper can be found here:

NetSig: network-based discovery from cancer genomes

Heiko Horn, Michael S Lawrence, Candace R Chouinard, Yashaswi Shrestha, Jessica Xin Hu, Elizabeth Worstell, Emily Shea, Nina Ilic, Eejung Kim, Atanas Kamburov, Alireza Kashani, William C Hahn, Joshua D Campbell, Jesse S Boehm, Gad Getz & Kasper Lage

Abstract:

Methods that integrate molecular network information and tumor genome data could complement gene-based statistical tests to identify likely new cancer genes; but such approaches are challenging to validate at scale, and their predictive value remains unclear. We developed a robust statistic (NetSig) that integrates protein interaction networks with data from 4,742 tumor exomes. NetSig can accurately classify known driver genes in 60% of tested tumor types and predicts 62 new driver candidates. Using a quantitative experimental framework to determine in vivo tumorigenic potential in mice, we found that NetSig candidates induce tumors at rates that are comparable to those of known oncogenes and are ten-fold higher than those of random genes. By reanalyzing nine tumor-inducing NetSig candidates in 242 patients with oncogene-negative lung adenocarcinomas, we find that two (AKT2 and TFDP2) are significantly amplified. Our study presents a scalable integrated computational and experimental workflow to expand discovery from cancer genomes.

Congratulations to Kasper on being promoted to Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School as of November 1st 2017!!!