WEBINAR | Liquid biopsies for tracking molecular resistance in cancer

PROFESSOR SARAH-JANE DAWSON
Medical Oncologist and Group Leader, Molecular Biomarkers and Translational Genomics
University of Melbourne Centre for Cancer Research and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

Cell-free circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) can be found in the bloodstream of cancer patients and is increasingly being explored as an important biomarker to monitor adaptive changes to cancer therapies. Cell-free DNA fragments from multiple lesions mix together in the peripheral blood, hence ctDNA contains a wide representation of the genomes from multiple metastatic sites. For this reason, genome-wide analysis of ctDNA has the potential to provide an unprecedented insight into changes in the genomic landscape that occur during the development of disease and in response to cancer therapies.

To date, the use of ctDNA to monitor the tumor landscape has been limited to tracking genomic evolution. However, it is now clear that cancers can also adapt to therapeutic pressure by significantly altering their transcriptome. Currently we have a limited understanding of how “non-genomic” transcriptional adaptation leads to clonal dominance or the evasion of cancer therapies.

Professor Dawson will provide an overview of the use of ctDNA based approaches to track both genomic evolution and transcriptional changes in real-time to improve our understanding of the mechanisms leading to molecular resistance in cancer.

Professor Sarah-Jane Dawson is a clinician-scientist. She obtained her medical degree from the University of Melbourne in 1998, and trained as a medical oncologist in Melbourne, Australia. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK. Following postdoctoral studies at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, she returned to Melbourne in 2014 to head the Molecular Biomarkers and Translational Genomics Laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.

Professor Dawson also holds a joint appointment with the University of Melbourne Centre of Cancer Research (since 2016) and currently holds a CSL Centenary Fellowship (2018-2022). Her current research interests are focused on the development of noninvasive blood-based biomarkers ('liquid biopsies') for clinical application, including early detection, risk stratification and disease monitoring in cancer management.