Vanessa Dumeaux
The overall goal of my research is to develop sensitive methodology to identify RNA biomarker signatures in blood as surrogate tissue, study how these signatures inform us on hormonal breast carcinogenesis and breast cancer susceptibility in relation to hormone exposure, and how these signatures can be used to improve prediction, diagnosis and prognosis of breast cancer.
Further biomarker characterization and prioritization are needed to increase the chances of these candidates being validated and translated into clinical assays. Data mining of microarray compendia to define tissue-specific biological processes provides a method for further refining lists of candidate biomarkers and intelligently selecting an enriched set of candidates placed in the context of the known human gene interaction networks.
The aim of my ongoing project in collaboration with Olga Troyanskaya, at Princeton University, is to extend SPELL (Serial Patterns of Expression Levels Locator) analysis to human microarray compendia.