Ahmet ACAR

Team Leader/Assistant Professor, CEO & Founder HistoCan, Precision Medicine and Drug Resistance Lab, Department of Biological Sciences, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, TURKEY

Friday, 1 April 2022 | 12:00 noon – ICGEB Trieste, ITALY

Developing quantitative experimental model systems to study drug resistance

Host: G. Del Sal

It is widely known that secondary resistance inevitably leads to treatment failure through Darwinian evolution. Therefore, quantifying the clonal evolution using experimental model systems can hold a great promise in designing evolutionarily informed therapies, and thus, in predicting drug response. In this talk, I will present our recently developed strategy that contributed to the understanding of collateral drug sensitivity with its direct link to clonal evolution to overcome the drug resistance in non-small cell lung cancer cell line model system. More specifically, high-complexity cellular barcoding allowed us the identification of the resistance that was ultimately driven by the presence and emergence of multiple pre-existing and de novo resistant clones, respectively. Overall, our work highlighted evolutionary trade-offs and provided an opportunity to exploit the tumour’s vulnerability. Finally, I will present our ongoing projects in the lab with a particular emphasis on the establishment of Patient-Derived Organoids (PDOs) from metastatic colorectal cancer patients.

#ICGEBseminars

Hundreds of videos, tens of playlists providing free scientific content worldwide