Narrow Results

This article is about the research done in Bioinformatics Institute. It describes the research focus of the team at BII. It also summarizes the ongoing collaborations and partnerships the institution has with other partners.

Life of a Scientist – Dr Koji Itahana (Duke – NUS)

"Cancer Bioinformatics" is a new book published in 2014 by Springer. This 14-chapter book offers a quite unique and potentially controversial view about what drives a cancer to initiate, progress, metastasize and develop in an accelerated manner in metastatic sites. The book treats cancer as an evolutionary process of a diseased tissue (rather than cells) in an increasingly more challenging microenvironment; and discusses the various stresses encountered by a neoplastic tissue and their roles in (driving) cancer initiation, progression, metastasis and post-metastatic development. Most of the discussions are made based on discoveries through mining cancer tissue omic data. In contrast to the on-going theories that cancers are the result of genomic mutations, the book clearly downplays the roles of genomic mutations, particularly oncogenic mutations, in cancer formation and progression. Throughout the book, the authors made special efforts in conveying their overarching view that cancer is a pathway to cell survival under certain stresses, and cell proliferation is either the result or a side-effect of survival processes when evolving to overcome the stresses. While the book is presented in an informatics style, it is actually a book of cancer biology focused on how information can be derived from cancer omic data to address a variety of basic cancer biology questions. Compared to other cancer biology books, this book is clearly less detail-oriented but more holistic and spans the entire range of cancer evolution.

There is no doubt that quantum mechanics has become one of the building blocks of our physical world today. It is one of the most rapidly growing fields of science that can potentially change every aspect of our life. Quantum biology is one of the most essential parts of this era which can be considered as a game-changer in medicine especially in the field of cancer. Despite quantum biology having gained more attention during the last decades, there are still so many unanswered questions concerning cancer biology and so many unpaved roads in this regard. This review paper is an effort to answer the question of how biological phenomena such as cancer can be described through the quantum mechanical framework. In other words, is there a correlation between cancer biology and quantum mechanics, and how? This literature review paper reports on the recently published researches based on the principles of quantum physics with focus on cancer biology and metabolism.

In cancer, complex ecosystems of interacting cell types play fundamental roles in tumor development, progression, and response to therapy. However, the cellular organization, community structure, and spatially defined microenvironments of human tumors remain poorly understood. With the emergence of new technologies for high-throughput spatial profiling of complex tissue specimens, it is now possible to identify clinically significant spatial features with high granularity. In this PSB workshop, we will highlight recent advances in this area and explore how single cell spatial profiling can advance precision cancer medicine.