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Using Massively Parallel Sequencing to Guide Precision Cancer Medicine and Drive Therapeutic Discovery
Part of the BTEC Fall 2021 Seminar Series
Friday, Oct. 22, 2021
10:40–11:30 a.m.
Associate Director, Center for Cancer Genomics, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Precision cancer medicine aims to classify tumors by site, histology, and molecular tests to determine an individualized profile of cancer alterations. Massively parallel sequencing (MPS) has gained widespread use in both research and clinical laboratories for a variety of applications, including the identification of genomic factors contributing to tumorigenesis at the DNA level (such as somatic mutations, DNA insertions and deletions, and structural variants), RNA level (transcriptome alterations), single-cell/nucleus level, or epigenetically, among others. In this talk, Dr. Thorner will describe MPS processes and the use of bulk DNA/RNA and single-cell/nucleus sequencing to drive discovery and guide patient care.
Speaker
Aaron R. Thorner, Ph.D.
Associate Director, Center for Cancer Genomics (CCG),
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
About the presenter
Dr. Aaron Thorner, a molecular biology and genomics expert, is the associate director and former clinical genomics group lead of the Center for Cancer Genomics (CCG) at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI)/Harvard Medical School. The CCG is an integrated research center focused on advancing precision medicine by developing and optimizing Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies and analyses, providing these technologies to investigators, and implementing assays in the clinical setting.
After earning a Bachelor of Science in cellular, developmental biology from the University of New Hampshire and a Ph.D. in genetics and molecular biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Thorner completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School/ Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in Boston, Mass.