BCAN 2019: The Biomarker Discovery Process for Bladder Cancer

Washington, DC (UroToday.com) Seungchan Kim from Praire View A&M University discussed biomarker discovery. He reviewed the importance of sample size, bioprocessing, and internal validation. First, you have to determine a hypothesis and the sufficient power needed to test the hypothesis. Normalization compensates for technical and/or biological covariates ie RNA seq. which can be single sample or aggregate normalization. Error estimation critically important when determining sample size estimates. The network-based approach is a pathway-based analysis to determine biomarkers and understand the outcome. Evaluation of differential dependency has been used in cancer cell lines with RNA sequencing data to identify pathways enriched with differential dependency.

Dr. Kim was recently awarded a Department of Defense translational team science award for the development of classifiers for bladder cancer using the above-mentioned methodology. True errors, number of features and numbers of samples are critically important in biomarker discovery.

Presented by: Seungchan Kim, Ph.D, Chief Scientist and Executive Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of the CRI Center for Computational Systems Biology at the Prairie View A&M University, Praire View, TX 

Written by: Stephen B. Williams, MD, Medical Director for High Value Care; Chief of Urology, Associate Professor, Director of Urologic Oncology, Director Urologic Research, The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, TX and Ashish M. Kamat, MD, Professor, Department of Urology, Division of Surgery, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX at the 2019 Bladder  Cancer Advocacy Network  (BCAN) Think Tank August 8-10,  2019  -  the  Capital Hilton,  Washington, DC, USA