Transcriptional Regulation - NCSA
Home > Research > Project Highlights > Transcriptional Regulation
To understand the mechanisms by which metastatic prostate cancer tumors become resistant to drug therapies, NCSA researchers are collaborating with Mayo Clinic and the University of Navarra to identify disruptions in the gene regulatory networks of patients receiving hormonal treatment.
NCSA’s Healthcare Innovation program office leveraged the center’s visual analytics expertise to apply an iterative clustering method and develop a statistical measure to identify significantly rewired gene regulatory networks. In contrast to traditional methods, which often focus on individual target genes, NCSA’s approach considers the interrelated regulatory relationships among co-expressed sets of functionally related genes.
Overall, NCSA identified key differences in the gene regulatory networks of patients with drug-responsive and drug-resistant cancers. From these networks, NCSA was able to extract potential regulatory drivers of cancer growth and find new molecular predictors of drug resistance in prostate cancer.