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Drivers of Cancer

What are the casual relationships between genetic and epigenetic alterations and cancer progression? What is their molecular basis? How can we detect driver events in cancer? These are some of the questions at the heart of understanding the causes of cancer.

Dr. Anna Panchenko, Canada Research Chair in Computational Biology and Biophysics, researches the causes of cancer progression in order to find which extrinsic and intrinsic factors can contribute to cancer mutation occurrence in DNA and to discover molecular mechanisms of how these mutations can affect proteins, protein interactions, and dynamical behavior of chromatin.

This will be achieved by designing new computational methods that integrate hypothesis- and data- driven approaches, molecular modeling, and machine learning. Panchenko’s research will offer key insights into the basis of mutagenesis and DNA repair, and contribution of these processes to cancer etiology, the knowledge of which is a prerequisite for developing novel targeted therapeutic strategies.

This can lead to predicting the behaviour of the body’s response system to disease and offer experimental insights to identify driver mutations and genes in cancer, as well as for the development of treatments affecting protein interactions and pathways.