Cancer evolution and identification of relapse-initiating cells (CEVIR)

Cancer is an evolutionary disease, and cancer cells are constantly changing in response to se- lection pressures imposed by the environment and by treatment. The CEVIR project will study relapse-initiating cells using genomics and epigenomics technology. The resulting data will be used to reconstruct the evolutionary processes in lung cancers using computational methods, with the goal of developing blood-based monitoring assays for identifying the earli- est signs of cancer relapse. Within the CEVIR project, the lab of Christoph Bock at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine (http://epigenomics.cemm.oeaw.ac.at) will perform DNA methylation sequencing on cell-free DNA and single cells, and they will con- tribute their expertise with bioinformatic analysis of next generation sequencing data.

Cancer is an evolutionary disease, and cancer cells are constantly changing in response to selection pressures imposed by the environment and by treatment. The CEVIR project has studied cancer evolution and relapse using genomics and epigenomics technology. The resulting data were bioinformatically analysed and used to reconstruct the evolutionary processes in cancers, with the goal of developing blood-based monitoring assays for identifying the earliest signs of cancer relapse. Within the CEVIR project, the laboratory of Christoph Bock at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine (https://cemm.at/research/groups/christoph-bock-group/) focused on the epigenetic of cell-free DNA and on the development and application of bioinformatic methods for epigenetic datasets.