OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Both the ENCODE and TCGA projects highlighted the value of quantifying multiple biomarker classes (DNA, RNA, and protein) from cancer tumor samples. In the case of cancer immunotherapy, the importance of measuring non-DNA markers (e.g., mRNA and proteins) becomes crucial since cell signaling, tumor microenvironment, and protein-protein interactions dominate over pure SNP-based (DNA) driver mutations in determining therapeutic response. Combining multiple data types together into a single correlated analysis, however, is adversely effected by the drastically different methodologies utilized for measurement. For example, the fluorescence signal intensity obtained from a camera imaging a protein array (e.g., RPPA) is very difficult to correlate directly with an RNA sequencing count of a clonally amplified, cDNA-converted, mRNA molecule. New developments in multiple biomarker-class optical barcode counting significantly reduce this problem. Recent developments using NanoString Technology has shown how optical barcode technology can be utilized for multiplexed digital counting of proteins and be combined with simultaneous digital counting of nucleic acids on a single platform.