Therapeutic impact of clonal heterogeneity of human pancreatic adenocarcinoma

A single pancreatic tumor is not a single population of cells. This project examines how that clonal heterogeneity — the genetically distinct subpopulations within one patient’s adenocarcinoma — shapes the response to therapy, using the computational genomics methods the Applied Bioinformatics Laboratories specialise in.

Dr. Kalfakakou is a post-doctoral bioinformatics fellow in the Simeone and Tsirigos labs at NYU Langone Health. She has more than 18 years of experience in genomics and machine learning at NYU and IBM Research, and has co-authored over 130 studies in peer-reviewed journals — including high-impact work in cancer genomics and epigenomics, high-throughput single-cell transcriptomic analyzes, and cancer diagnostics using machine learning. Her team of 25 computational biologists and data scientists works to leverage domain expertise, big data and computational technique to transform clinical practice for patients.