What are you currently working on?
Dr. Vanessa Dumeaux Assistant Professor Contact Info vdumeaux@uwo.ca
“We are studying health and disease in the context of the individual. I have had a longstanding interest for breast cancer and have invested research efforts to look at molecular fingerprints to help predict disease progression and response to therapies. My research looks at the interplay between the disease cells with the surrounding tissue and the interactions with tissues that are further away. We are particularly interested with the circulating immune cells and the gut microbiome and how they interact with the diseased tissue. For that, we use high throughput technologies to measure the expression of genes in multiple tissues and extract information from that. Data science is an important discipline in my lab, mostly because the data we collect are very large – there are 22,000 genes, multiple individuals, and several tissues. So in order to help us find patterns in that data and extract biological knowledge, we do a lot of programming, data analysis and visualization. The goal is to develop clinical assays and translate this knowledge into the clinic.”
“These efforts will help predict disease progression and response to therapies.” What are some of your research goals? “Definitely translation to the clinic is one thing that is very important. I was describing assays for breast cancer - for example, we aim to develop tests that will inform clinicians and the patients about whether, for example, a woman diagnosed with a non-invasive breast cancer needs radiotherapy or not. It has a direct impact in guiding treatment. Another interesting goal that I'm looking forward to when I start at Western is training bio students in data science. Data scientists have to think about how to study those giant Excel tables and how to best present and illustrate the results. The last goal is about developing new technologies. There is a lot of technology development in genomics so we can look even deeper into one tissue. Now, you can go as far as looking at all genes in a single cell. I'm looking forward to participating in developing those approaches so I can get the most exciting results out of my research data.” 9
