Treehouse Childhood Cancer Initiative

May 19Join us! Bringing research into the clinic for children with cancer - https://mailchi.mp//uc-santa-cruz-genomics-institute-news- With no medical school, we are doing diagnostic testing for COVID-19. Come hear how we’ll bring this expertise to bear on identifying better treatments for pediatric cancer at the next Kraw Lecture Wed. May 19 5:30-7-pm Register: bit.ly/3ozRWHn

It's super gratifying to hear from alumni who are applying skills learned in UCSC labs in the fight against cancer. Recent grad student Jacob Pfeil participated in a recent competition to develop a better way to predict response among lung cancer patients to a type of immuno-oncology therapy, and his method was the best predictor of response (https://www.synapse.org/#!Synapse:syn18404605/wiki/609126)! Jacob wrote to thank his Treehouse colleagues for their mentorship, and said he hopes to highlight this approach in a manuscript soon.

Huge congratulations to Treehouse undergraduate researcher Sneha Jariwala who received a 2021 Chancellor’s Award for outstanding achievements in Molecular, Cell, & Developmental Biology, and for her senior research thesis: Molecular Classification of Pediatric High-Risk Leukemias Using Expression Profiles of Multimodally Expressed Genes. Fantastic work! We look forward to many more celebrations as you embark on your career in science.

UCSC provides its undergrads amazing opportunities to do actual science! Sign up by Feb. 19 and see and see if bioinformatics might be in your future: https://treehousegenomics.soe.ucsc.edu//are-you-intereste/

Treehouse's mission is to fight every child's cancer by harnessing and sharing the world's genomic data. In our latest study, we demonstrate how novel biological insights could be derived from combined analysis of several previously published datasets. With this analysis, we have improved our understanding of the developmental origin and timing of these aggressive and untreatable cancers, which clearly demonstrates the importance of making genomic data available to the commun...ity in a timely manner. Read here: https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giaa136 Thank you to authors who have worked so hard to bring this new information to light: Lauren M Sanders, Allison Cheney, Lucas Seninge, Anouk van den Bout, Marissa Chen, Holly C Beale, Ellen Towle Kephart, Jacob Pfeil, Katrina Learned, A Geoffrey Lyle, Isabel Bjork, David Haussler, Sofie R Salama, Olena M Vaske UC Santa Cruz , Jack Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Cruz Science, #pediatriccancer #genomics #DIPG #braintumor #H3K27m #glioblastoma #glioma