Nicholas E. Navin
Assistant Professor
Department of Genetics
Department of Bioinformatics & Computational Biology
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Investigating Clonal Evolution with Single Cell Genomics
Tumors evolve from single cells. As they evolve they acquire complex genomic mutations and diverge to form multiple subpopulations, resulting in intratumor heterogeneity. This genomic heterogeneity plays an important role in clonal evolution during the growth of the primary tumor and during invasion, metastasis and the evolution of chemoresistance in breast cancer patients. In this talk I will provide an overview of the experimental and computational methods we have developed to perform single cell DNA sequencing to measure copy number profiles, point mutations and indels in individual tumor cells. I will also discuss our efforts in applying these methods to study punctuated copy number evolution and mutator phenotypes in triple-negative (ER-, PR-, Her2-) breast cancer patients.
