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Biology subjects

Huang, Y. P.

Publications and source records attributed to Huang, Y. P..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Delaying Cancer Progression by Integrating Toxicity Constraints in a Model of Adaptive Therapy

Cancer therapies often fail when intolerable toxicity or drug-resistant cancer cells undermine otherwise effective treatment strategies. Over the past decade, adaptive therapy has emerged as a promising approach to postpone emergence of resistance by altering dose timing based on tumor burden thresholds. Despite encouraging results, these protocols often overlook the crucial role of toxicity-induced treatment breaks, which may permit tumor regrowth. Herein, we explore the following question: would incorporating toxicity feedback improve or hinder the efficacy of adaptive therapy? To address this question, we propose a mathematical framework for incorporating toxic feedback into treatment design. We find that the degree of competition between sensitive and resistant populations, along with the growth rate of resistant cells, critically modulates the impact of toxicity feedback on time to progression. Further, our model identifies circumstances where strategic treatment breaks, which may be based on either tumor size or toxicity, can mitigate overtreatment and extend time to progression, both at the baseline parameterization and across a heterogeneous virtual population. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of integrating toxicity considerations into the design of adaptive therapy.

systems biology↗

bamSliceR: cross-cohort variant and allelic bias analysis for rare variants and rare diseases

The NCI Genomic Data Commons (GDC) provides controlled access to sequencing data from thousands of subjects, enabling large-scale study of impactful genetic alterations such as simple and complex germline and structural variants. However, efficient analysis requires significant computational resources and expertise, especially when recalling variants from raw sequence reads. We thus developed bamSliceR, an R/Bioconductor package that builds upon the GenomicDataCommons package to extract aligned sequence reads from cross-GDC meta-cohorts, followed by targeted analysis of variants and effects (including transcript-aware variant annotation from transcriptome-aligned GDC RNA data). Here we demonstrate population-scale genomic & transcriptomic analyses with minimal compute burden via bamSliceR, identifying recurrent, clinically relevant sequence and structural variants in the TARGET AML and BEAT-AML cohorts. We then validate results in the (non-GDC) Leucegene cohort, demonstrating how the bamSliceR pipeline can be seamlessly applied to replicate findings in non-GDC cohorts. These variants directly yield clinically impactful and biologically testable hypotheses for mechanistic investigation. bamSliceR has been submitted to the Bioconductor project, where it is presently under review, and is available on GitHub at https://github.com/trichelab/bamSliceR.

bioinformatics↗