Data & Precision medicine

07/04/2017

Treatments no longer depend only on the location of the tumor but also on its molecular profile. Next generation sequencing technology has now reached tremendous throughput and accuracy that enables Institut Curie to conduct large-scale genomic projects. The multidisciplinary expertise of our bioinformaticians, biostatisticians and software engineers allows top quality statistical data analysis, data management, software development and high performance computing. This new dimension is investigated in early clinical trials in order to benefit patients.

Precision medicine

Precision or personalized medicine uses patient specific biological information concerning the tumor and its environment to prevent, diagnose and choose the best treatment for the individual. The overall aim is to find new forms of cancer treatment adapted to the tumor according to its nature and no longer according to its location.

Unlike conventional chemotherapies that also affect normal cells, targeted therapies offered to patients specifically recognize the abnormality present on tumor cells. Personalized medicine is therefore one of the pillars of tomorrow's approach to oncology

World premiere, SHIVA 01 and 02 clinical trials, are being held at Institut Curie led by Professor Christophe Le Tourneau, head of the early clinical trials department.

Discover the many clinical trials sponsored by Institut Curie that are open to retrospective collaboration.

Sequencing

The ICGex NGS core facility provides technical and scientific support in experimental design and sequencing strategies. Molecular characterization of clinical samples within a few days allows clinicians to evaluate the best therapeutic options for patient care. Our technological services are:

Whole genome, whole exome and targeted resequencing
Transcriptome analysis (RNA-seq for mRNA, total RNA and small RNA)
Epigenetics with DNA methylation, ChIP-seq for histone modifications or protein binding analysis and chromosome conformation capture approaches
Single-cell RNA sequencing
Long-read sequencing
Bioinformatics support through a Galaxy user-friendly interface (U900)

Data analysis & Bioinformatics

The bioinformatics core facility is composed of more than 30 bioinformatics scientists, statisticians, and IT support engineers who support, the research units and hospitals in their activities.

This includes development of solutions anywhere between fundamental and clinical research. The bioinformatics platform includes a 2PB informatics infrastructure. One bioinformatics engineer is completely dedicated to pipeline optimization with big data technologies.

The expertise of our engineers, physicists, and mathematicians enable clinical data analysis structured and non-structured data from medical files and the tumor library and biological files (provided by chips).

Skills range from statistical data analysis, storage, data management to software development and high performance computing.

This is sufficient to cover fundamental, translational and clinical research, as well as clinical routine. In fact, Institute Curie has gathered a unique real-life dataset.

Bioinformatics environment:

Analysis of genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic chips (RPPA)
Analysis of large-scale sequencing (sequence variants, ChIP-Seq, Small RNA-Seq, HiSeq, RNA-Seq)
Mass spectrometry analysis
Analysis of high-throughput cell phenotyping data
Participation in clinical trials in oncology
Development of an information system for integration of heterogeneous data, etc.
Implementing scientific methodology of data and biological network analysis into user friendly software package
Research and development for new biostatistical methods and bioinformatics tools.