Poster prize winners L. Arnes and K. Begum.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) centers at Columbia University Medical Center, Cornell University, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center co-hosted a two-day ‘Cancer Genomics and Mathematical Data Analysis Symposium’ at Columbia University in February, 2018. The theme of the symposium was the application of mathematical modeling and state-of-the-art genomic tools for addressing challenging questions in cancer evolution and heterogeneity, precision medicine, and drug resistance.

Poster prize winner J. Bannon.

The conference consisted of interactive sessions that brought together cross-disciplinary experts including mathematicians, physicists, computational biologists, and oncologists. They presented emerging trends and recent advances in innovating mathematical and computational modeling of high-throughput datasets for spearheading complex problems in cancer research. The venue provided ample opportunity for networking and building collaborations including a poster session where Cancer Reports, Wiley’s new broad-scope cancer journal, sponsored three poster prizes. These were awarded to

1. Luis Arnes of the Rabadan Lab (Columbia University) for his comprehensive work on characterization of long non-coding RNA associated with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma;
2. James Bannon of the Mishra lab (New York University) for developing an open-source pipeline for mapping cancer progression; and
3. Kamrun Begum of the Barry Honig lab (Columbia University) for structure-based predictions of molecular interactions for hallmark cellular processes.

For additional conference details including the organizers and speakers, please visit the following weblinks:

1. http://cancergenomicconf2018.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/#intro
2. https://systemsbiology.columbia.edu/news/symposium-to-spotlight-advancements-in-translational-cancer-research

Photographs: Courtesy of Lydia Lee Photography/Columbia University Systems Biology