Our PI Dr Anguraj  Sadanandam of The Institute for Cancer Research in London shares three unique studies he and his team published in the last few days which are related to COLOSSUS research. The first and third papers below are followup studies on their interest in colorectal cancer and span work for almost 10 years!

In JCO Precision Oncology, they have published one of the novel concepts of identifying intra-tumoural heterogeneity in colorectal cancer and associating with therapy responses. Their novel biomarker and assay have the potential to predict response to anti-EGFR therapy. Since they could not access randomised clinical trial samples to show the predictability, they have demonstrated their biomarker’s prognostic capability in the paper: Intratumoral Transcriptome Heterogeneity Is Associated With Patient Prognosis and Sidedness in Patients With Colorectal Cancer Treated With Anti-EGFR Therapy From the CO.20 Trial

In the journal Cancers, they published their long-awaited, next-generation machine learning tool, PhenMap, that integrates genome-phenome. An advanced version of this tool is being used in COLOSSUS. They started this work in 2014 when “machine learning” was not a buzz word. While they published other machine learning tools and research, this paper got delayed due to other priorities. Here, they have applied the tool to breast cancer to provide a new dimension of therapy response and subtypes from traditionally published approaches. The paper is entitled: A Machine-Learning Tool Concurrently Models Single Omics and Phenome Data for Functional Subtyping and Personalized Cancer Medicine

In ESMO Open (in collaboration), the study examines risk stratification in CRC using ctDNA and CMS/CRCAssigner subtypes. This study, Detection of postoperative plasma circulating tumour DNA and lack of CDX2 expression as markers of recurrence in patients with localised colon cancer shows two different subtype biomarker assays that they have performed.

Congratulations to Anguraj and his wide network of researchers on these results!