Events: Unraveling the evolutionary principles of cancer

Matthew Jones will be giving a joint faculty candidate seminar in IMES and the Koch Institute 

“Unraveling the evolutionary principles of cancer”

 From the moment a cancer is initiated, it is evolving. Throughout tumor progression, various forces promote the evolution of cancer cells and the microenvironment in which they reside. Eventually, in most cases, patients succumb to cancer either because the tumor has evolved to a state that can no longer be controlled, or because the tumor evolves unpredictably.

 My research focuses on broadening the toolkit for studying tumor evolution, ultimately to address the challenge of understanding, predicting, and reshaping tumor progression. In this talk, I will provide an overview of my research, particularly illustrating how the tools I have developed for probing the spatiotemporal dynamics of tumors have led to fundamental new insights into the mechanisms driving rapid tumor evolution and drug resistance. These tools and findings hold promise for improving predictive modeling of tumors and point toward exciting directions that my lab will continue to explore. 

 Matthew Jones, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral scholar with Howard Chang at Stanford University. His research centers on expanding the toolkit for studying how tumors evolve over time, especially under various pressures exerted by the immune system and therapies. This work typically takes advantage of high-throughput sequencing assays (e.g., scRNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics), lineage-tracing technologies, and new computational tools and inference techniques. Previously, he earned his PhD with Jonathan Weissman and Nir Yosef at UCSF in Bioinformatics where he was a UCSF Discovery Fellow.  He is currently supported by an NCI Early-Career Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00).