Pan Prostate Cancer Group
Many groups around the world have generated whole genome DNA sequence (WGS) data. To co-ordinate this work Prof Ros Eeles (Institute of Cancer Research) held the first Pan Prostate Cancer Group (PPCG) workshop in London in October 2014. The attending groups unanimously supported the idea that the accumulated data should be collected and compared in a common format including common storage, re-analysis through a single pipeline, and investigation to achieve a variety of scientific goals. The data collected so far includes WGS and exomes from 2000 tumours and matching bloods, but this number is likely to expand considerably. The combined collection would include the following categories:
- cancers from different ethnic groups: e.g. Caucasian, Asian, Black Caribbean
- cancer from different stages of progression from normal, to organ confined disease, to metastases
- early onset prostate cancer
- prostate cancer from aggressive and indolent disease
- prostate cancer patients managed by different treatments with information linked to detailed and ongoing clinical follow-up data
Melbourne Bioinformatics provides computational resources and analytics expertise for the Australian component of the Pan Prostate Cancer Group, working in close collaboration with Prof Chris Hovens and the Prostate Cancer Research Group (University of Melbourne). As part of the Technical Working Group we have gathered DNA sequencing data and begun processing hundreds of whole genomes collected from Australian patients. These results will be pooled with analysis performed by our international partners, yielding a highly significant resource for cancer researchers worldwide.
In November 2017, Melbourne was host to the 2017 Pan Prostate Cancer Group scientific meeting, welcoming collaborators from around the world.
For more information, see the Pan Prostate Cancer Group.