Summary, scientific background, and expected impact

The identification of cancer cell vulnerabilities and the development of effective drugs against tumor cells are important subjects in the cancer research community aimed at improving cancer care. Emerging next generation sequencing technologies provide large collections of data and a unique opportunity for computational modeling and statistical analysis to provide rational, effective methods of analyzing these data. However, there is still a gap between the biomedical and computational science communities regarding the important biological questions that need to be answered. Hence, at this critical juncture, my colleagues and I (as computational biologists at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre) feel it is important to contribute to knowledge transfer to help trainees and principle investigators with mathematical, computational, and statistical background who are interested in solving biological problems.

The biological problems we are going to talk about will be focused on most recent topics in computational cancer biology including 1) Identifying non-coding chromosome regions associated with vulnerability of cancer cells, 2) Identifying the signature of cancer stem cells using genomic and epigenomic profiles of cells, 3) Biomarker discovery for targeted cancer therapies, 4) Predicting synergy between drugs in combination therapies, and 5) Identifying essential genes using CRISPR screens.

Activity structure

The workshop will include 5 sessions and an introductory talk. The introductory talk will be a 15 minutes talk by the lead organizer to describe the structure and subject of each session. There will be 2 sessions in the morning and 3 in the afternoon (after lunch).

Each session will include 4 parts:

1. 20 minutes about introduction of the problem and some biological background,
2. 20 minutes about what mathematical and computational models have been used to tackle the problem (state-of-the-art and the widely used approaches),
3. 20 minutes about the publically available data and how the data can be processed and used for the target problem,
4. 15 minutes Q&A.

Speakers:

1. Seyed Ali Madani Tonekaboni (Princess Margaret Cancer Centre)
2. Azin Sayad (Princess Margaret Hospital)
3. Alex Murison (Princess Margaret Cancer Centre)
4. Parisa Mazrooei (Princess Margaret Cancer Centre)
5. Zhaleh Safikhani (Princess Margaret Cancer Centre)

Potential Participants

Graduate students, postdocs and other researchers interested in moving into this field from the Universities of Toronto, Waterloo, McMaster, and other Fields Institute Principal Sponsoring (and affiliated) Universities.