Steve Piccolo's Blog

Some of you heard that I presented a paper at a conference last November. It was in Washington D.C. at the Fall Symposium for the American Medical Informatics Association. The title of my paper was “Somatic Mutations of Cancer.” It has been made available online, so below is a link where you can read it if you’re interested.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=18999255

The idea behind this paper is that mutations are known to play an important role in how tumors start and progress. As tumors get more and more mutations, tumors generally get worse. Lots of researchers are studying mutations in individual cancer types (e.g. lung cancer, brain cancer, leukemia). Recently some researchers in the United Kingdom put together a huge database that combined the results from thousands of these papers. My research was to use computer algorithms to try to find meaningful patterns in the data.

I learned a lot in the process, and it was fun to have others be interested in it.

My co-author, Dr. Lewis Frey, is my PhD advisor at the University of Utah. He’s been instrumental in guiding this research and getting it accepted.

Posted on March 23rd, 2009 under Research • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback