A long-standing problem in breast cancer treatment is the lack of identified genes that are differentially expressed in cancer cells and thus can be used as targets for therapy or diagnosis. Computer based mining of public sequence databases has led to the identification of a variety of new genes, but to date no breast cancer genes suitable for targeting with antibody based therapies are known. To address this problem we have developed a custom library, which is specifically enriched for breast cancer genes. From this library we have discovered several new genes, two of which are candidates for cancer diagnosis and therapy. The bioinformatics involved in these discoveries will be presented with an emphasis on the value of a solid computer science education.
Bio
Jim Vincent received undergraduate degrees in Chemistry and Computer Science from the University of Vermont in 1991/92. After completing a
PhD degree in Physical Chemistry at The Pennsylvania State University, he accepted a post-doctoral position as a Cancer Research Training Fellow
at the National Cancer Institute in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He has since become Staff Scientist in the same laboratory.
Dr. Vincent's research includes protein engineering and design of immunotoxins for cancer therapy, and
gene discovery using bioinformatics to search for cancer related genes.