MOB Approach to Features Shared by Pediatric Osteosarcoma and Bone Metastatic Prostate Cancer
Thursday, September 21, 2023
2:30 PM-4:30 PM
BIOMED PhD Research Proposal
Title:
Multi-omics-based (MOB) Approach to Understanding Genomic and Functional Features Shared by Pediatric Osteosarcoma and Bone Metastatic Prostate Cancer
Speaker:
Waleed Iqbal, PhD Candidate
School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems
Drexel University
Advisors:
Alessandro Fatatis, PhD
Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology
College of Medicine
Drexel University
Amy Throckmorton, PhD
Professor
School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems
Drexel University
Details:
Diverse cellular abnormalities drive both adult and pediatric tumor growth and metastasis. The overarching hypothesis of this dissertation research is that there is a link between a prostate cancer tumor phenotype, which metastasizes to the bone, and osteosarcoma, the most diagnosed pediatric tumor. Both bone tumor types are expected to be treated similarly, such as surgery or targeted therapies focusing on shared biological pathways. The overall goal of the proposed project is to generate an epigenetic and gene signature of this shared tumor phenotype based on bulk and single-cell prostate and pediatric osteosarcoma cancer datasets. A bioinformatics pipeline will then utilize these references to classify clinical samples based on these references.
Prostate cancer tumors that metastasize to the bone and primary osteosarcomas are expected to have shared phenotypes based on low androgen receptor (AR) and high interleukin-1beta (IL-1b) expression. A standard treatment for advanced prostate cancers is androgen deprivation (interfering with the effects of testosterone). However, 10-20% of patients develop treatment resistance, defined as castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), within five years of diagnosis. The role of the AR gene has been implicated in prostate cancer progression. Our preliminary studies have shown a link between low AR/ high IL-1b prostate tumors that correlate with bone metastases.
In addition, as in prostate cancer, multiple studies have shown the importance of AR and IL-1b in osteosarcomas. Interestingly, osteosarcoma is more prevalent in males, and for females, it usually occurs much earlier in age (due to females undergoing puberty at an earlier age), which supports hormonal association. This provides a strong motivation for investigating gene expression and analogous epigenetic patterns, such as methylation in prostate cancer and pediatric osteosarcomas, to curate a reference signature by utilizing all public sequencing info for these tumor types.
Contact Information
Natalia Broz
njb33@drexel.edu