Quantitative Issues in Cancer Research Working Seminar

Sahand Hormoz, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School

“What Can Single Cell Lineage Trees Tell Us About Blood Cancers?”

ABSTRACT: I will talk about our recent efforts to determine when cancer first occurs and the dynamics of its expansion in individual patients with a type of blood cancer called myeloproliferative neoplasm. We do this by reconstructing the lineage trees of individual cancer cells. Surprisingly, the driver mutation for this type of blood cancer occurs decades before diagnosis. I will also discuss tools from synthetic biology that can help us reconstruct lineage trees of single cells.