What a groundbreaking study showed
Scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine harnessed one algorithm machine learning to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing researchers in the fight against cancer: predicting when cancer will resist chemotherapy. The groundbreaking study was published in the journal Cancer Discovery.
While scientists recognize that a tumor’s genetic makeup greatly influences its specific response to drugs, the sheer number of mutations found in tumors has made predicting drug resistance a difficult task.
The new algorithm overcomes this hurdle by investigating how numerous genetic mutations collectively affect a tumor’s response to drugs that block DNA replication in rapidly dividing cancer cells.
Specifically, The researchers tested their model on cervical cancer tumors, where about 35% of tumors persist after treatment. The model was able to identify tumors at greatest risk for treatment resistance and was also able to identify much of the underlying molecular mechanism that leads to treatment resistance.
