PRESS RELEASE Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) has received a $6.5 million, up to two-year, federally funded contract from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH). ISB is one of three organizations awarded a contract by NCI to develop a cloud-based platform that will serve as a large-scale data repository and provide the computational infrastructure necessary to carry out cancer genomics research at unprecedented scales. ISB’s Shmulevich…
3 Bullets: Computer simulation is a promising way to model multicellular biological systems to help understand complexity underlying health and disease. Biocellion is a high-performance computing (HPC) framework that enables the simulation of billions of cells across multiple scales. Biocellion facilitates researchers without HPC expertise to easily build and simulate large models. By Theo Knijnenburg How do molecular changes, such as a mutation in the DNA or infection by a…
3 Bullets: Gastric cancer has a high mortality rate, but current classification systems haven’t been effective in helping to identify subtypes relevant for treatment of the disease. TCGA researchers have integrated molecular data from 295 stomach tumors and have discovered four subtypes of gastric cancer. Stratification of patients into these four subtypes paves the way for the development of new personalized therapies. By Theo Knijnenburg Gastric cancer is among the…
By Theo Knijnenburg ISB Editorial Board Member When a patient receives a diagnosis of breast cancer, it’s a specific subtype of breast cancer, such as invasive ductal carcinoma. Each subtype is characterized by the shape and location of the tumor, its growth progression, prognosis and treatment. The ability to stratify, or group, cancer patients based on the specific characteristics of their cancer type, is the first step toward personalized cancer…
Congratulations to Dick Kreisberg, Ryan Bressler, Sheila Reynolds, Brady Bernard and Ilya Shmulevich on winning "Best Poster" at the BioVis 2013 conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Here's a link to the poster description. Ryo Sakai, who is currently a visiting researcher in the Shmulevich group from KU Leuven in Belgium, received honorable mention in both the "Redesign Contest" and the "Data Contest." Data science for the win!
Dr. Brady Bernard, Andrea Eakin, and Dr. Ilya Shmulevich, of The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), were awarded first prize and will split $70,000 for their winning entry researching more than 25 different types of cancers and thousands of patients to gain insight into the biological networks that are disrupted or altered within a given cancer type and to identify potentially potent approved drugs that could be repurposed for the…
When you see a reference to “cancer research,” you know that it’s important. But do you really know what it means and how complex the research is? Many ISB scientists are entrenched in molecular cancer research. To better appreciate what they’re tackling, let’s talk about The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project. In understanding cancers, researchers first have to know what errors in the DNA of tumor cells cause them to…
About 20 years ago, Carole Ellison attended a lecture by Dr. Lee Hood shortly after he had arrived at the University of Washington to start the Department of Molecular Biotechnology. She was impressed by his vision for the future of science and healthcare and vowed to meet him one day. This wish and her lifelong interest in science and human health led her to ISB. This summer, Carole finally was…
The Ilya Shmulevich Group at ISB has been participating in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project as a Genome Data Analysis Center. The first paper resulting from the main phase of the TCGA project – "Comprehensive molecular characterization of human colon and rectal cancer" – was published in the July 19, 2012, issue of Nature and also featured on the front page of the New York Times. ISB teamed up…
We were very excited to watch the live stream of the keynote from the Google I/O conference today, because it featured work from ISB's Shmulevich Lab, which is one of a group of research organizations that has been working on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). To help visualize the TCGA data, the lab created the Cancer Regulome Explorer using Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine. Google Compute Engine is…
