4 minute read
Dr. Vanessa Dumeaux
Assistant Professor
Contact Info
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vdumeaux@uwo.ca
What are you currently working on?
“We arestudying 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 theinteractions 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.”
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. ”
What are some important steps you took to get to where you are?
What led you to this breast cancer research?
What is your favourite thing about research?
“I have had a rather non-canonical career path. The academic research road is generally very linear – you do a master’s, PhD, postdoc, maybe a second post doc. But, this linear path does not always fit all personal situations., I wanted to be with my family and didn’t want to sacrifice that. It was a bit of a roadblock, but I found creative ways to do what I love, for example, by starting my own freelance consultancy business. During this time, I developed a lot of collaborations, which was really empowering and exciting. I think that being resourceful is very important in many aspects of a researcher’s life. There is now a lot of information on the internet that you can use to learn a new skill. I have, and still do, continuously take advantage of that.”
“I come from a very small place in France, and I didn't really even know what research wasall about. I just followed what I wanted to do; I decided on pharmacy just because I liked the courses, then I read a book about viruses, and decided to do a master’s in epidemiology. My first research project was looking at the risk factors of breast cancer back in the early 2000s. At the same time, the first DNA sequence of the full human genome was being released. So, we could now locatewhere the genes are and how they are coded.A new technology was alsocoming out sowecouldlook at alot of genes in the same tissue. I thoughtit was fascinating.As an epidemiologist, I was always thinking about what were the best data that I could collect to answer the questions I was the most excited about. At the end, I wanted to explore breast cancer. I was interested in biology in a very exciting time and this is how I fell in love with genomics and data science. The rest is history.”
“Research is really about digging for information and communicate the results the best way possible. The first step is about having a question, collecting the right data and digging into it to get some answers. I find it very thrilling and interesting. The second step is more about finding the best way to illustrate or communicate those results to the community. I want to impact society by being helpful and contributing positively, and that could be by carefully putting a figure together to help share knowledge. ”
