Detecting circulating tumour DNA in localised prostate cancer | Associate Prof Bernie Pope

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR BERNIE POPE
Victorian Health and Medical Research Fellow, University of Melbourne
Associate Director Human Genome Informatics, Australian BioCommons
Human Genomics Lead, Melbourne Bioinformatics

Circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) has many uses in cancer research and treatment. These include early detection of cancer, identification of cancer recurrence, determination of treatment resistance mechanisms, monitoring of tumour evolution, identification of therapy targets and monitoring treatment response. A distinct benefit of ctDNA is that it involves a relatively non-invasive tissue collection procedure – “liquid bioposies” – compared to tumour tissue sampling.

In prostate cancer, ctDNA has established prognostic use in metastatic disease, where a high abundance of tumour DNA in the blood stream favours detection. However, localized prostate cancer yields comparatively far lower amounts of ctDNA, and has therefore proven difficult to detect with existing methods. In this seminar we will present our recent work into the application of highly sensitive methods for detecting ctDNA in localised prostate, and show that although ctDNA is uncommonly detected in this context, its presence portends more rapidly progressive disease.

Associate Professor Bernie Pope is a computer scientist and bioinformatician with a teaching and research track  record spanning genomics, computational biology, programming languages, and high-performance computing. He leads the Cancer and Clinical Genomics research themes at Melbourne
Bioinformatics within the University of Melbourne and is the Associate Director for Human Genome Informatics at Australian BioCommons.

Bernie is particularly interested in applying computational techniques to improve our understanding of the cellular processes that underpin cancer development, and is currently undertaking a Victorian Health and Medical Research Fellowship.