Greehey CCRI Seminar Series: Xiaotu Ma, PhD (St. Jude)

The past decade has witnessed numerous novel genomic insights on childhood cancers. Built upon this success, our team focuses on developing computational methods aimed at improving cure rates. In this talk, I will present our recent progress in gaining information from the cancer development process. First, I will discuss computational error suppression methods (PMID: 30867008 and 33487172) that enabled cancer early detection where mutations are present at a very low frequency (~0.1%). With these tools, I will then discuss our recent investigation on the mechanism of oncogenic fusion formation (PMID: 37019972), where molecular factors, including splicing, translation, and numeric constraints, including gene length, are found to influence childhood cancer formation and, therefore, incidence. We will present evidence on differential oncogenicity of fusion oncoproteins that are found prognostic. We will also discuss novel therapeutic opportunities that theoretically have no toxicity to any normal cells.  Following this line of thinking, We will present unpublished findings on novel vulnerabilities.

Learn more about Dr. Ma's research: stjude.org/research/labs/ma-lab.html

Dr. Ma is hosted by Siyuan Zheng, PhD