Director of the Centre for Evolution and Cancer Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK London, England, United Kingdom
Description: Understanding how a cancer grew prior to diagnosis may offer valuable insight into its likely clinical course, hypothesizing that slow growing tumours would be relatively benign whereas young and fast growing tumours would be aggressive. This presentation will highlight a novel approach that uses natural fluctuations in DNA methylation to reconstruct the evolutionary history of lymphoid cancers. Applied to nearly 2,000 cases, this method reveals that evolutionary history strongly predicts clinical outcome across disease types, foremost in predicting the time to first treatment in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL).
Learning Objectives: - Explain the concept of fluctuating methylation and it's use for lineage tracing - Understand how lineage tracing reveals the clonal evolutionary history of lymphoid neoplasms - Describe how evolutionary history predicts clinical outcome in CLL
