The Tumor Phylogeny Visualization Project is helping clinicians and researchers better understand cancer treatment options by visualizing the progression of healthy cells to primary and metastatic tumors that invade organs and tissues.
Classically, the approach to cancer treatment has been based on broad clinical classifications. However, current genetic sequencing studies show that even tumors of the same type will be vastly different from each other. Tumor phylogeny analysis can help create a more targeted and individualized approach for each patient.
NCSA’s Data Analytics and Visualization team, with support from the NCSA Healthcare Innovation program office and the UIUC Cancer Center at Illinois, is building an interactive visualization software that makes phylogeny research more accessible to both researchers and clinicians. This software will be able to answer questions tailored to the user, such as whether a patient’s tumor is more likely to be metastatic, or whether it might be resistant to drug treatment.
This project is a collaboration with researchers at Mayo Clinic’s Center for Individualized Medicine and UIUC Department of Computer Science. Together, they are establishing the first standardized and reproducible workflow for end-to-end tumor phylogeny research.