Monday 1 March 2021

SSBTR International Webinar Lecture Series Day: 2021 March 14 (Sunday) IST 13:45 Hour

 Society for Systems Biology & Translational Research (SSBTR) is a registered (and also both 12A & 80G certified) not-for-profit scientific society organizes an International Webinar Series Lectures on Translational Systems Biology.

All are cordially invited. For date, time and link and other details as below:

GOOGLE MEET Link: url (https://meet.google.com/qjb-utgp-ymk)

Day: 2021-March-14 (Sunday)    Time: IST 14:00 Hour

# Speaker: Dr. Milana Frenkel-Morgenstern
Title: Diagnosis of Glioma Tumors Using Circulating Cell-Free DNA

Abstract: Gliomas are the most frequent brain tumors, making up about 30% of all brain and central nervous system tumors, and 80% of all malignant brain tumors. Diagnosis of different glioma tumor types and their tumor grade is an essential step to suggest a right treatment for the glioma patients. Existing standard diagnostic technique for glioma tumor includes tissue biopsy, which is a highly invasive and hence a risky technique for the patient’s survival. ‘Liquid biopsy’ is a new and recently developed non-invasive cancer diagnostic technique. This technique includes collection of blood or urine samples and diagnosis of cancer based on analyzing molecular bits or cancer cells that are released from tumor tissue into the blood or urine system. Circulating cell-free DNA (cfDNA) fragments is one those molecular bits that are released into the bloodstream after rapid apoptosis or necrosis of the tumor cells in the cancer patients. Our goal is to do comprehensive study between distinct types of glioma cancer tumors and cfDNA of the respective patients, to elucidate the scope of cfDNA in liquid biopsy technique for glioma diagnosis. We have successfully detected glioma specific mutations such as IDH1, IDH2, PDGFRA, NOTCH1, PIK3R1 and TP53, from cfDNA isolated from the plasma of glioma patients and could relate these mutations to the different tumor grades of glioma. Moreover, we have identified unique gene-gene fusions that provide a personalized drug response to glioma treatment. Our study may help in developing liquid biopsy technique for glioma tumor diagnosis and in its prognosis for monitoring the glioma treatment by non-invasive approach, and will eventually help physicians to decide on the right treatment while bypassing the existing ''wait-and-see' approach of treatment monitoring.
Biosketch: Dr. Milana Frenkel-Morgenstern, Senior Lecturer and Head of Cancer Genomics and Bio-computing of Complex Diseases, Azrieli Faculty of Medicine,
Bar-Ilan University. She has completed her Ph.D in the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel in 2006. She made her first postdoc in the lab of Prof. Uri Alon in Systems Biology in the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and the second postdoc in the lab of Prof. Alfonso Valencia in the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), Spain. She has published more than 50 papers in reputed journals and serving as an editorial board member of repute. She is a founder of special scientific Art in Science competition at the international Bioinformatics conferences since 2008, a chair of the ISCB affiliated Israeli Bioinformatics group. Her group has developed unique protocols for the cell free DNA isolation and its analysis using unique and patented techniques, the group in working in evolution of protein interaction networks.  

# Speaker: Dr. Durjoy Majumder 
Title: Development of Algorithm for Automated Diagnosis of Leukemia : A Systems Biology Application for Preventive Oncology
Abstract: Bone marrow biopsy has become an integral part of leukemia diagnosis and its treatment. Several advancements are being made towards the analysis of digital images of biopsy samples. Recently FDA approved the procedures of digital health. In tune with that digital image analysis has become propelled. With the advent of high-throughput technologies, scientific community becomes interested to look into the red blood cells (RBCs) for early detection of cancer, including leukemia. The reasons are due to their abundance in peripheral blood and hence, easily accessible compared to bone marrow biopsy procedure. High magnification and high-resolution electron microscopy based ultra-structural analysis of RBCs already proved the utility of the hypothesis about a decade ago. However, in clinical set-up, electron microscopy based procedures are the major bottleneck in implementation of early detection of leukemia. Algorithm based computer vision may be suitable to overcome this limitation. To fill the existing gap a user-friendly MatLab coding is developed for automated analysis of RBC images. RBC images from both normal and leukemia were analyzed with the developed code. Each RBC cells were analyzed individually for each samples of normal and leukemia. So in the output cellular characteristics namely, radius, perimeter, area, convexity, solidity were represented in a quantitative manner. Comparison of mean values between normal and leukemia groups for corresponding variables showed statistical significance (p<0.05). Thus, the developed code successfully distinguishes between RBC cells of leukemia and normal. We hope that this RBC based developed code would be useful in identifying early stage of leukemia in an individual patient; however, for this ~100 RBC cells are needed to be analyzed. Thus it is expected that the developed code may play a role in preventive oncology.
Biosketch: Dr. Durjoy Majumder, Assistant Professor of Physiology, West Bengal State University, received his Ph.D. in 2006 from Biophysics & Structural Genomics Division of Saha institute of Nuclear Physics. He gained a multi-/interdisciplinary research experience by working in science, medical and engineering faculties. He worked in different tertiary grade medical institutions like School of Tropical Medicine, Kolkata and Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow. Before joining to present position he hold a faculty position in engineering faculty of Institute Indian Institute Engineering Science & Technology, Shibpur. His research interests include cancer, cancer immunology, cancer systems biology, systems pharmacology, pre- and post-clinical phases of cancer management. He has more than 50 research publications in different peer-reviewed journals, conferences, book chapters and book. He holds positions of editorial board members in different international journals. In the area of systems biology, his research group has developed a new philosophical outlook called “Middle-out Rationalistic Analysis” for cancer systems.

Event Photos: 

 

    





COMPLETED
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Durjoy Majumder, Ph.D.

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