"Human Somatic Evolution, from New Measurements to Clinical Impact"
Presenter: Dan A. Landau, MD, PhD, Chair of Systems and Computational Biomedicine and the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of Systems and Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medicine
Every tissue in the body is a mosaic of cells that have acquired somatic mutations, each a record of that tissue's history. Dr. Landau’s lab develops technologies to read this record. Single-cell genotyping of expressed genes links a cell's mutations to its state, showing how somatic mutations reshape cellular programs in cancer and clonal disorders. Single-cell whole-genome sequencing reads the past, reconstructing the phylogenies of tumors and normal tissues as they evolve. D&D-seq adds a new modality that reads a cell's future state, essential for sequence-to-function models and cellular engineering. Finally, cell-free DNA carries this record into the bloodstream. Whole-genome sequencing of plasma, combined with machine learning, detects disease and predicts clinical outcome from a routine blood draw. Throughout this work, progress has followed from new ways of measuring. Dr. Landau will close by describing how that lesson shapes his department's AI vision: building datasets that don't yet exist, at the scale and clinical depth models require; training physician-scientists fluent in both biology and computation; finding open lanes through collaboration; and contributing to Weill Cornell's broader AI initiative.
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