Title：The Drivers of Malignant Brain Tumors

Speaker: Antonio Iavarone

                 Professor of Neurology and Pathology and Cell Biology (with Tenure) in the Institute for Cancer Genetics,

                 Columbia University, New York

Host：Prof.WANG Qianfei

Time：10:00-11:30 am, Dec 2，2014

Location：First-floor seminar hall, BIG, CAS 

Introduction: Using integrated systems biology and experimental pipelines tailored towards the most significant and unbiased cancer gene sets Dr. Iavarone’s have undertaken the task of identifying master regulators of aggressiveness in distinct sub-groups of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). They have recently focused on assaying integrated systems approaches to de-convolute and target distinct sub-types of GBM. Specifically, mutations, copy number variation and genetic rearrangements analysis of TCGA derived data are identified, integrated and functionalized. This effort has already generated two landmark manuscripts, the first published in Nature in 2010 and reporting the transcriptional module for the mesenchymal subgroup of GBM and the second, published in Science, reporting the first example of recurrent, oncogenic and addicting gene fusions in GBM. A third manuscript reporting the integrated landscape of driver alterations in GBM has just been published in Nature Genetics. Following their work, several manuscripts have confirmed the occurrence of FGFR-TACC fusions in pediatric and adult glioma and have established that other tumor types (NSCLC, head and neck cancer, bladder cancer) also harbor the same FGFR-TACC gene fusions initially reported by them in glioblastoma. The present proposal is the first integrated computational and experimental pipeline for the characterizing the evolution of GBM and to derived personalized therapeutic strategies.