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Biology subjects

De Sano, L.

Publications and source records attributed to De Sano, L..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Evolutionary signatures of human cancers revealed via genomic analysis of over 35,000 patients

By leveraging the ever-increasing availability of cancer omics data and the continuous advances in cancer data science and machine learning, we have discovered the existence of cancer type-specific evolutionary signatures associated with different disease outcomes. These signatures represent "favored trajectories" of acquisition of driver mutations that are repeatedly detected in patients with similar prognosis. In this work, we present a novel framework named ASCETIC (Agony-baSed Cancer EvoluTion InferenCe) that extracts such signatures from NGS experiments generated by different technologies such as bulk and single-cell sequencing data. In our study, we applied ASCETIC to (i) single-cell sequencing data from 146 patients with distinct myeloid malignancies and bulk whole-exome sequencing data from 366 acute myeloid leukemia patients, (ii) multi-region sequencing data from 100 early-stage lung cancer patients from the TRACERx project, (iii) whole-exome/genome sequencing data from more than 10,000 Pan-Cancer Atlas samples, and (iv) targeted bulk sequencing data from more than 25,000 MSK-MET metastatic patients (both datasets including multiple cancer types). As a result, we extracted different cancer (sub)type-specific single-nucleotide variants evolutionary signatures associated with clusters of patients with statistically significant different prognoses. In addition, we conducted several validations using diverse and previously unexplored datasets to evaluate the reliability and applicability of the evolutionary signatures extracted by ASCETIC. Such analyses provided evidence of the robustness and generalizability of the identified evolutionary patterns.

genetics↗

OncoScore: An R Package To Measure The Oncogenic Potential Of Genes

The increasing availability of sequencing data of cancer samples is fueling the development of algorithmic strategies to investigate tumor heterogeneity and infer reliable models of cancer evolution. We here build up on previous works on cancer progression inference from genomic alteration data, to deliver two distinct Cytoscape-based applications, which allow to produce, visualize and manipulate cancer evolution models, also by interacting with public genomic and proteomics databases. In particular, we here introduce cyTRON, a stand-alone Cytoscape app, and cyTRON/JS, a web application which employs the functionalities of Cytoscape/JS.\n\ncyTRON was developed in Java; the code is available at https://github.com/BIMIB-DISCo/cyTRON and on the Cytoscape App Store http://apps.cytoscape.org/apps/cytron. cyTRON/JS was developed in JavaScript and R; the source code of the tool is available at https://github.com/BIMIB-DISCo/cyTRON-js and the tool is accessible from https://bimib.disco.unimib.it/cytronjs/welcome.

bioinformatics↗

A Computational Framework To Infer The Order Of Accumulating Mutations In Individual Tumors

BackgroundA large number of algorithms is being developed to reconstruct evolutionary models of individual tumours from genome sequencing data. Most methods can analyze multiple samples collected either through bulk multi-region sequencing experiments or the sequencing of individual cancer cells. However, rarely the same method can support both data types. ResultsWe introduce TRaIT, a computational framework to infer mutational graphs that model the accumulation of multiple types of somatic alterations driving tumour evolution. Compared to other tools, TRaIT supports multi-region and single-cell sequencing data within the same statistical framework, and delivers expressive models that capture many complex evolutionary phenomena. TRaIT improves accuracy, robustness to data-specific errors and computational complexity compared to competing methods. ConclusionsWe show that the application of TRaIT to single-cell and multi-region cancer datasets can produce accurate and reliable models of single-tumour evolution, quantify the extent of intra-tumour heterogeneity and generate new testable experimental hypotheses.

bioinformatics↗

SIMLR: A Tool For Large-Scale Single-Cell Analysis By Multi-Kernel Learning

MotivationWe here present SIMLR (Single-cell Interpretation via Multi-kernel LeaRning), an open-source tool that implements a novel framework to learn a cell-to-cell similarity measure from single-cell RNA-seq data. SIMLR can be effectively used to perform tasks such as dimension reduction, clustering, and visualization of heterogeneous populations of cells. SIMLR was benchmarked against state-of-the-art methods for these three tasks on several public datasets, showing it to be scalable and capable of greatly improving clustering performance, as well as providing valuable insights by making the data more interpretable via better a visualization.\n\nAvailability and ImplementationSIMLR is available on GitHub in both R and MATLAB implementations. Furthermore, it is also available as an R package on bioconductor.org.\n\nContactbowang87@stanford.edu or daniele.ramazzotti@stanford.edu\n\nSupplementary InformationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

bioinformatics↗

OncoScore: a novel, Internet-based tool to assess the oncogenic potential of genes

The complicated, evolving landscape of cancer mutations poses a formidable challenge to identify cancer genes among the large lists of mutations typically generated in NGS experiments. The ability to prioritize these variants is therefore of paramount importance. To address this issue we developed OncoScore, a text-mining tool that ranks genes according to their association with cancer, based on available biomedical literature. Receiver operating characteristic curve and the area under the curve (AUC) metrics on manually curated datasets confirmed the excellent discriminating capability of OncoScore (OncoScore cut-off threshold = 21.09; AUC = 90.3%, 95% CI: 88.1-92.5%), indicating that OncoScore provides useful results in cases where an efficient prioritization of cancer-associated genes is needed.

bioinformatics↗