Cure cancer from your laptop

For decades, cancer research has been an active area of study for biologists and medical doctors alike. Cancer is fully of mysteries. For instance, why do two individuals with seemingly similar tumors sometimes have very different outcomes? Suppose that two individuals with breast cancer have tumors that look quite similar to each other under the microscope. It turns out that those two individuals can have very different responses to chemotherapy and other treatments, as well as drastically different survival outcomes.

In order to better understand this phenomenon, researchers have developed ways to obtain a molecular snapshot of an individual’s tumor. This snapshot includes the tumor’s DNA sequence, gene expression levels, and other detailed biological information. It amounts to gigabytes of data for a single individual. The goal is to find a way to use this data in order to better understand an individual’s tumor. For instance, is it possible to use an individuals’ molecular snapshot in order to determine how that person will respond to chemotherapy? I will talk about how we can use a specific area of statistics, called machine learning, in order to uncover the mysteries of cancer and move closer to a cure.