Project

Onderzoeksbeurs Emmanuel Van Der Schueren Annelien Mortion: Computational deconvolution of plasma RNA profiles

Code
365M01218
Duration
01 September 2018 → 31 August 2019
Funding
Funding by bilateral agreement (private and foundations)
Research disciplines
  • Medical and health sciences
    • Analysis of next-generation sequence data
    • Bioinformatics of disease
    • Cancer biology
    • Cancer diagnosis
Keywords
cancer
 
Project description

In cancer, liquid biopsies such as plasma are an extremely attractive resource for the discovery of novel biomarkers. Because plasma collection doesn't require invasive procedures, it can be obtained serially and may help clinicians to improve or facilitate diagnosis, therapeutic decision making or therapy response monitoring. Various studies have indicated that plasma contains various RNA molecules. RNA molecules can be expressed in a highly-tissue specific manner. By combining this knowledge with RNA expression profiles of cancer patient plasma samples, this project aims to gain insights in the origin of plasma RNA and use plasma RNA profiles as a window into the activity of different tissues (including the tumor itself) in cancer patients.