Pathology Atlas to be previewed at AACR17

A demo version of a new Pathology Atlas will be presented on April 2-5 at the annual meeting of American Association of Cancer Research (AACR17) in Washington, DC. Launched by the Human Protein Atlas consortium in Sweden, the new atlas provides researchers information about the relationship of expression levels of human genes with the clinical outcome in nearly 8,000 cancer patients.

All major cancers have been analyzed, including cancers such as colorectal, renal, liver, breast, lung and prostate. Human Protein Atlas Director Mathias Uhlén, who will speak at the conference, says the Pathology Atlas is based on the integration of publicly available data from The Cancer Genome Atlas and "in-house" data generated within the framework of the Human Protein Atlas project.

"Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide and there is great interest in understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms involved in the pathogenesis and progression of individual tumors," he says. "The Pathology Atlas provides researchers the possibility to explore the effect of individual genes and the consequences of high and low expression for the survival of a given cancer patient."

More than 500,000 survival (Kaplan-Meier) curves and underlying clinical metadata for all patients are presented in an interactive database. The analysis also includes personalized metabolic modelling of each tumor to facilitate cancer research aimed at developing novel individual treatment schemes based on precision cancer medicine strategies.

"We are excited to launch this knowledge resource for cancer-related research and to enable scientists to study the effect of the genetic make-up of individual tumors and the clinical effect of these changes," Uhlén says.

The Pathology Atlas will be released to the public later this year in conjunction with the publication of an accompanied scientific publication. The new knowledge resource will be available without restriction based an open access policy.

Provided by KTH Royal Institute of Technology