Student Researcher and Team Use NCI’s Cancer Genomics Cloud to Explore Rare Musculoskeletal Tumor
On behalf of her peers at the University of Pittsburgh’s Musculoskeletal Oncology Laboratory (MOL), medical student Ms. Trudy Zou will illustrate how she and her team used the Cancer Genomics Cloud (CGC) to identify genomic alterations in a rare musculoskeletal tumor called “extraskeletal myxoid chondrosarcoma” (EMC).
Using a rare primary EMC sample and the power of whole genome sequencing, Ms. Zou and her team identified structural variants that contribute to metastasis to the lungs and progression to pelvic metastases and that can be targeted for therapy. The mission of the MOL (which is partially funded by NCI) is to better understand the biology of various primary and metastatic musculoskeletal tumors and translate discoveries into clinical solutions.
As one of NCI’s Cloud Resources, the CGC provides researchers access to a wide variety of data sets from NCI Cancer Research Data Commons repositories along with a catalog of tools to analyze and visualize the data directly from the browser.
Ms. Zou is a medical student in the Physician Scientist Training Program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She is primarily studying chondrosarcoma with Drs. Rebecca Watters and Kurt Weiss at the Musculoskeletal Oncology Laboratory. Prior to this, she earned her bachelor of science degree in cellular and molecular biology at Duke University where, under the supervision of Dr. Julia Visgauss, she studied drivers of metastasis and therapeutics for chondrosarcoma.