Understanding Cervical Cancer and Papillomaviruses Through Long-read Sequencing

To start the new year, the NCI Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) Cancer Genomics Cloud (CGC) welcomes Dr. Michael Dean and Ms. Nicole Rossi from the Laboratory of Translational Genomics at NCI’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics. Dr. Dean and Ms. Rossi will share how they detected the integration of human papillomavirus’ (HPV’s) genetic information into the human genome using the CGC platform and tools to perform bioinformatic analysis.

In their study, Dr. Dean and Ms. Rossi sequenced long pieces of HPV DNA from 65 cervical cancer tumor samples to identify the most carcinogenic HPV subtypes. This analysis allowed Dr. Dean and Ms. Rossi to identify genetic changes that contribute to HPV integration in human DNA. This is important because highly carcinogenic HPV subtypes infect cells, causing them to multiply in an uncontrolled manner. While these infected cells are generally recognized and controlled by the immune system, some may escape detection and eventually become cancerous.

As one of the three Cloud Resources within the NCI CRDC, the Seven Bridges’ CGC provides researchers access to a wide variety of data sets, a catalog of tools to analyze and visualize the data directly from the browser, and scalable computational resources to perform large scale analysis on the cloud.