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Project

LIQUIDEVO: Unravelling breast cancer heterogeneity, progression and treatment resistance in the context of a rapid post-mortem institutional tissue donation program using phylogenetic reconstruction algorithms and an Open Science approach.

Approximatively 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer (BC) in her lifetime. About one third of all BC patients will ultimately develop metastases. Unfortunately, metastatic BC is still uncurable and remains poorly characterized. There is therefore a strong need to better understand disease progression and treatment resistance, in order to refine treatment strategies. The main issues for investigating metastatic BC are that metastases are difficult to biopsy and that biopsies do not capture the full heterogeneity of the disease. Here, in LIQUIDEVO, we aim at capturing metastatic BC heterogeneity by sequencing genomes of all metastases and body fluids (blood, urine, pleural and pericardial fluid) from 15 patients with BC that agreed to participate to our institutional rapid post-mortem tissue donation program (UPTIDER). The objectives of the present project are to: (1) unravel the genomic alterations and mutational signatures associated with disease progression and treatment resistance using whole genome sequencing, (2) apply phylogenetic algorithms to reconstruct disease evolution, (3) assess which source of liquid biopsies best capture the genomic alterations present in the different metastases of a patient to future guide therapeutic decision-making in a minimally invasive and/or more accurate way. Importantly, this work will be conducted in an Open Science approach ensuring results and pipelines to be easily available to the scientific community. 

Date:1 Oct 2021 →  Today
Keywords:Autopsies from metastatic breast cancer patients, Liquid biopsy, Phylogenetic reconstruction of disease progression
Disciplines:Analysis of next-generation sequence data, Bioinformatics of disease, Cancer biology