Ruppin Co-Authors Paper on Predicting Cellular-Level Responses to Cancer Treatments

Eytan Ruppin, a professor of computer science and director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, recently co-authored a paper on novel methods to predict how cancerous cells might respond to certain treatments.

In a paper published in the journal Cell, Ruppin and other researchers described their concept of “synthetic lethality.” They analyzed large sets of genetic and molecular data from clinical cancer samples, and were able to identify a comprehensive set of synthetic “lethal pairs” that, they believe, form the core synthetic lethality network of cancer.

The researchers—who in addition to Ruppin are from Tel Aviv University, the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Scotland, and the Center for the Science of Therapeutics, which is under the Broad Institute of Harvard University and MIT— demonstrated that such a network could be used to successfully predict the response of cancer cells to various treatments. It can also predict a patient's prognosis based on personal genomic information.

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