Daniel Vilar Jorge

Development of Tamoxifen-Resistance Knowledge base (TR-KB)/determination of epigenetic signatures

Daniel Vilar Jorge MSc

"The biology of cancer is something we cannot look at as black and white. I believe that combining biology with informatics may hold the key to look at the grey areas more clearly and aim for better improvement in the cancer genetics and epigenetics area."

Early Stage Researcher 11
Name: Daniel Vilar Jorge
Gender: Male
Country of Birth: Portugal
MSc in: Biochemistry (University of Lisbon, Portugal)

Marie Skłodowska Curie PhD Fellowship in Bioinformatics/Data analysis at Imperial College London.

Project: “Dissecting heterogeneity of drug-resistance networks to develop robust predictors of Tamoxifen response”

Supervision: PI Ed Curry; Prof. Bob Brown and Dr Luca Magnani (ICL), EpiPredict co-PIs Dr Alex Michie (ClinicaGeno Ltd.) and Prof. Antoine van Kampen (UvA, NL)

PhD programme: Imperial College London, The Department of Surgery and Cancer Postgraduate research program

Key Objectives & Expected Results

Objectives

  • Identify multiple resistance modules in RNA-seq, RPPA and DNA methylation datasets, TR-KB
  • Test resistance modules for association with drug resistance in large cancer cell line compendia
  • Integrate with DNase hypersensitivity and ChIP-seq data (Dr Luca Magnani) for further evidence of epigenetic dysregulation
  • Build composite predictive model from resistance modules
  • Contribute to the informatics and content of the project KnowledgeBase

Expected Results

  • Evaluation of different epigenetic signatures’ ability to predict Tamoxifen treatment outcome
  • Prediction of Tamoxifen treatment outcome based on epigenetic profiling

Host training: Information Management, bioinformatics analysis, product prototype development

Planned secondment(s): ICL: Epigenetic profiles (M10-11), UvA: Bioinformatics/modelling (M14-15) MTASZBK: DNA methylation interference tools (M19)