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Ables participant: The Cancer Signalling Research Group at the University of Newcastle (UON)

Project title

Development of the ADvanced mAchine learning Precision Treatment Strategy (ADAPTS) platform for patients with Diffuse Midline Glioma (DMG)

Collaborators and funding

Funding partners: The Kids’ Cancer Project, RUN DIPG

Collaborators:

Bioinformatics support:

Contact(s)

Project description and aims

Diffuse midline glioma (DMG) is a uniformly fatal brain tumour, representing the most common cause of cancer-related death in children. Despite extensive research efforts, radiotherapy remains the sole treatment option and patients still tragically succumb within a year of diagnosis. It remains clear that in the clinical setting, our current armamentarium against DMG falls desperately short of acceptable, highlighting the urgent imperative for innovative research and therapeutic strategies.

This project aims to develop the ADvanced mAchine learning Precision Treatment Strategy (ADAPTS) platform, which will enable the analysis of time-series multiomics data from core biopsies, cerebrospinal fluid, and peripheral blood samples collected from both on-treatment patients and DMG mouse models. This framework will enable to model tumour adaptation to treatments and identify the next targetable vulnerability. To achieve this, machine learning models are trained on on-treatment matched tumour and blood samples to help predicting the relevant timeframe for administering the subsequent treatment based on blood profiling. The objective of this project aligns with the era of personalised medicine, as we aim to adjust therapeutic regimens throughout the treatment journey of patients using non-invasive techniques to enhance their survival and quality of life.

How is ABLeS supporting this work?

This work is supported through Production bioinformatics scheme provided by ABLeS. The supports includes unlimited temporary storage on scratch, 15 TB permenant storage, 35 TB temporary stroage and 50 KSUs per quarter.

Expected outputs enabled by participation in ABLeS

A public ADAPTS platform, featuring computational workflows developed on GitHub, and freely accessible datasets available for researchers and clinicians to analyse the temporal adaptation of therapeutics used in DMG treatment. The machine learning models trained on these data are anticipated to inform the clinical management of DMG patients by suggesting a temporal and sequential treatment plan tailored to each patient’s tumour biology in real-time using non-invasive blood profiling. Our goal is to publish our findings in high-impact journals such as Cancer Cell.


These details have been provided by project members at project initiation. For more information on the project, please consult the contact(s) or project links above.