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Workpackage 6

Application in oncology (individualized decisions in colorectal and metastatic cancer)

Annalen Bleckmann and Jochen Gaedcke

In the Applications work package, led by Annalen Bleckmann and Jochen Gaedcke, the developed tools will be applied on real patient data from different interdisciplinary research consortia. Informed consent for all patients and the required ethics votes were obtained in these consortia. Thus, Omics data from colorectal cancer primary tumors as well as from liver and brain metastases of breast and colorectal cancer will be reanalyzed together with WP3 and WP7 and used to determine patient or cohort specific pathways based on this data. Thus, the data will be interrogated to generate clinical hypotheses to predict prognosis retrospectively and to identify potential new targets for treatment. The identified targets/pathways will be validated in prospectively collected independent patient sets. The identified targets will be screened for important pathway hubs that might be clinically relevant. These targets will then be screened in larger patient cohorts. Finally, such targets will be functionally evaluated in vitro using knock down approaches to assess relevance for carcinogenesis and tumor progression. WP6 will work closely together with WP7 and use the general, integrative use cases there to translate them into clinical hypotheses and work on their validation.