EACR Industry Webinar with Menarini Silicon Biosystems: "Single cell analysis in tissue and liquid biopsy: the way to dissect cancer heterogeneity"

Virtual Event, Worldwide

27 October 2022

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16:00 CEST on Zoom

This free webinar is hosted in collaboration with Menarini Silicon Biosystems, one of our valued EACR Industry Partners. We are delighted to welcome Francesca Lessi and Michail Ignatiadis who will discuss their latest breakthrough research aimed at better understanding cancer heterogeneity using single cell analysis.

Talk Abstracts

Dr Francesca Lessi, PhD
“New approaches with DEPArray in glioblastoma: single-cell molecular characterization and circulating tumor cells”
Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) are considered to be one of the important causes of tumor recurrence and distant metastasis. For many years, glioblastoma (GB) was thought to be restricted to the brain. Nevertheless, a growing body of evidence indicates that, like many other cancers, hematogenic dissemination is a reality. The absence of a procedural uniformity in literature prompted us to develop an innovative and sensitive method to obtain CTCs in GB. Our aim is to define the genetic background of single CTCs compared with the primary GB tumor and its recurrence to assess whether or not their presence in the peripheral circulation correlates with GB migration and dissemination. Data from the study of a case report of a glioblastoma patient with distant recurrence will be shown. Moreover, to understand the importance of tumor heterogeneity in GB, which is also responsible for resistance to therapy, we will show results on single cell analysis performed with DEPArray on GB fresh tissues.

Dr Michail Ignatiadis, MD PhD
“Understanding breast cancer heterogeneity using single circulating tumor cell analysis”
Single cell technologies allow the interrogation of tumor heterogeneity, providing insights into tumor evolution and treatment resistance. To better understand whether circulating tumor cells (CTCs) could complement metastatic biopsies for tumor genomic profiling, we characterized 11 single CTCs and 10 pooled CTC samples at the mutational and copy number aberration (CNA) levels, and compared these results with matched synchronous tumor biopsies from 3 metastatic breast cancer patients with triplenegative (TNBC), HER2-positive and estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) tumors. Similar CNA profiles and the same patient-specific driver mutations were found in bulk tissue and CTCs for the HER2-positive and TNBC tumors, whereas different CNA profiles and driver mutations were identified for the ER+ tumor, which presented two distinct clones in CTCs defined by mutations in ESR1 Y537N and TP53, respectively. Furthermore, de novo mutational signatures derived from CTCs described patient-specific biological processes. These data suggest that tumor tissue and CTCs provide complementary clinically relevant information to map tumor heterogeneity and tumor evolution.

Speaker Bios

Francesca Lessi is a Researcher in the Laboratory of Genomics and Transcriptomics at Fondazione Pisana per la Scienza. She received her Master’s degree in Biological Science and her PhD in Experimental and Molecular Oncology at the University of Pisa, Italy. She spent several months at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics (Oxford, UK) where she deepen her knowledge in molecular biology. In 2015, she obtained the Specialization in Clinical Pathology from Medical School of the University of Pisa.

Michail Ignatiadis, MD PhD is senior attending physician at the Medical Oncology Department, Jules Bordet Institute (IJB) and associate professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Since January 2021, he is the chair of the breast cancer group of the EORTC. He is also leading the Academic Trials Promoting Team (ATPT) and he is member of the Executive and Research Boards of IJB since October 2016. He participates in developing the IJB research strategy. He works with his team and members of the Executive and Research Boards to promote high-quality, innovative, academic research at the institutional level.

Open to all, you do not need to be an EACR member to attend.

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