Developing mathematical models for cancer genomics is a focus area of the research group. Currently, we work together with researchers from Princeton and Microsoft Research to identify signaling pathways and mechanisms responsible for sensitivity or resistance of cancer cell lines that have been treated with anticancer drugs. Our mathematical models look for specific mutation patterns in big genomic data of large drug screening sequencing projects. In particular, we are interested in finding sets of exclusive mutations or aberrations that correlate strongly with the profiles of sensitive cell lines. The algorithms we develop are based on advanced methods in combinatorial optimization, a branch of mathematics that typically deals with applications in planning, routing and scheduling tasks in industry. Finding solutions for these models requires a high performance computing infrastructure.
The Anton Betz Foundation supports this research area at HHU and finances the acquisition of a dedicated compute server node for cancer genomics. This makes it possible to run the mathematical models of the research group also in Düsseldorf.