News

The paper of Carolin Ector, one of our PhD students, was accepted in Nature Communications!

Congratulations!

About the recently accepted paper:

Our research addresses a highly topical issue in the field of personalized circadian medicine by describing the optimal timing for treatment in the context of cancer. A related paper recently published has already attracted international attention.

Overall, the topic promises to revolutionize many of the ongoing treatment strategies by focusing on the patient's internal biological clock. This has also been highlighted recently in the general press.

Our article, takes this to the next level by now making it possible to systematically discover optimal treatment times for specific tumor subtypes (personalized) and drugs.

As one of the reviewers of the manuscript said: “This approach could be the beginning of a pipeline to phenotype cancers that can make a big impact in the future. ”

An earlier version of our manuscript can be found on bioRxiv.

Summary | What is the optimal time of day for cancer treatment?

Circadian rhythms, the internal biological cycles that regulate essential processes such as wakefulness and sleep, are crucial for maintaining overall health. Disruptions in these rhythms can have profound impacts on health, contributing to various diseases. Aligning medical treatments with a patient's circadian clock can significantly enhance the effectiveness of therapies. 

Despite the known benefits, the clinical application of circadian-based treatments has been limited by the lack of efficient strategies to determine the optimal timing for specific drugs.

Addressing this critical gap, an interdisciplinary international team of researchers, led by the Granada Lab at Charité Berlin, has developed a pioneering high-throughput method to analyze how cancer cells respond to drugs at different times of the day. This innovative approach has enabled the identification of optimal treatment times that maximize the efficacy of cancer therapies while minimizing their toxicity.

By employing multiple-live reporter systems to monitor circadian rhythms and implementing cutting-edge time-of-day treatment protocols, the team has created a versatile framework. Their findings reveal that specific treatment timings can significantly enhance tumor cell death and reduce side effects.

The implications of this research are profound. By pinpointing the most responsive cell types and drug combinations, the study paves the way for more personalized and precise cancer therapies. This breakthrough underscores the importance of timing in cancer treatments and holds the potential to transform clinical practices.

For the seminar on the 15th of May at 11 am Viola Hollek invited Francesco Iorio from the Human Technopole (Milano, Italy), to give us a talk on his recent work. If you are interested in joining write an e-Mail to compcancer at charite dot de to receive the zoom link.

Dr. Francesco Iorio, a Research Group Leader in Computational Biology at the Human Technopole in Milan, with a rich background in computer science and a Ph.D. from the University of Salerno and the TeleThon Institute of Genetics and Medicine, has dedicated his career to advancing the fields of drug discovery and computational pharmacogenomics. His post-doctoral research at the prestigious EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute has paved the way for innovative computational frameworks to predict and dissect drug sensitivity in cancer. He’s presenting his latest work published in Cancer Cell on constructing a map of cancer dependencies, integrating comprehensive multi-omics data with CRISPR-Cas9 screens across 930 cancer cell lines. This work illuminates the intricate relationships between molecular markers and cancer vulnerabilities and opens new avenues for drug development against cancer.

We are pleased to announce our CompCancer Colloquium!

This time with two different topics, taking place each time at 4 pm (mostly) on Wednesdays at HU Campus Nord.
The posters will follow once all the speakers have confirmed, however, please save already the following dates in your calendar:

Evolving Cancer Genomes:
Tue, 28.05.24         Isidro Cortes Ciriano  (EMBL-EBI, UK)
Wed, 10.07.24        Kisten Kübler   (BIH, DE)
Wed, 18.09.24        Francesca Ciccarelli (Francis Crick Institute, UK)

Modelling and Systems Biology:
Wed, 21.08.24       Laurence Calzone (Institut Curie, FR)
Wed, 23.10.24       Francis Levi (Université Paris-Saclay, FR)
Wed, 20.11.24       Andrea Ciliberto (IFOM, IT)

For our first colloquium this year Marc Abrahams will give a talk about the IgNobel prize and Annals of Improbable Research!

Marc founded the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony in 1991, and serves as master of ceremonies. The prizes — for achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK — are handed out by genuine, bemused Nobel laureates in a gala event held every year at Harvard University

He co-founded and edits the magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), and has written This is Improbable, The Ig Nobel Prizes, and other books.

When? April 3rd 2024 at 4 pm

Where? HU Campus North, Philipstr. 13, House 18, Lecture Hall 2  (Location)

We are looking forward to see you there for this exciting talk!

For the seminar on the 6th of December Sofya Marchenko invited Dana Pe’er from the Sloan Kettering Institute (New York, USA), to give us a talk on her recent work. If you are interested in joining write an e-Mail to compcancer at charite dot de to receive the zoom link.

Because of the time difference, the literature seminar will take place virtually on zoom at 3 pm (Berlin- time).

Dr. Dana Pe’er is chair and professor in Computational and Systems Biology Program at Sloan Kettering Institute and a researcher in computational systems biology. She was previously a professor at columbia  Department of Biological Sciences. Pe’er’s research focuses on understanding the organization, function and evolution of molecular networks, particularly how genetic variations alter the regulatory network and how these genetic variations can cause cancer. Dana Pe’er investigates cellular development – in particular, how healthy cells shape their identities and build and repair organs, how cancer cells abandon those identities and hijack those processes, and how tissue environments influence an individual cell’s fate. Pe’er’s lab combines mathematical approaches with a range of emerging technologies that enable large-scale analyses of single cells. They are developing computational frameworks to characterize cell-state compositions and tissue-level dynamics and seeking to answer a variety of questions related to the causes and consequences of plasticity in development, regeneration, and cancer. For example, Pe’er wants to understand intratumoral heterogeneity which is essential for predicting cancer behavior and identifying molecular vulnerabilities.

Her Talk is titled „Beyond Cells: Gene programs and tissue context”. In which she will among others talk about methods and results from her very recent publication in Nature Biotechnology „Supervised discovery of interpretable gene programs from single-cell data” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-01940-3).