Presentation
With high-throughput drug sensitivity screens we can quickly test compounds on cancer cell lines to determine treatment efficacy. Since molecular characterisation of the cell lines by various omics data sets is frequently available, we can link molecular features to treatment efficacy. The estimation of drug synergy is important when testing multiple compounds, but in vitro cell viability measurements can be imprecise due to measurement errors and limited number of data points, especially for drug combination experiments. We have earlier proposed a Bayesian model for drug response estimation with uncertainty quantification for an individual experiment, i.e. for one drug combination and one cell line. This model formed the basis for a probabilistic framework for dose–response prediction in high-throughput drug combination screens on large numbers of drugs and cell lines, which uses permutation invariant multi-output Gaussian processes.
Manuela will introduce the modeling framework and show how the model is able to learn from noisily observed measurements in settings where the underlying dose–response experiments are of varying quality, utilize different experimental designs, and the resulting training dataset is sparsely observed; and that it can accurately predict dose–response and capture relevant features indicating synergistic interaction between drugs.
Speaker
Manuela Zucknick is Professor of Biostatistics at the Oslo Centre for Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital. Her main research interest is statistical learning for small and noisy biomedical data, with a main focus on the development of tailored models to allow incorporation of prior biological knowledge and efficient integration of multi-modal data, e.g when predicting treatment responses for applications in precision medicine.
Program
11:30 – Doors open and lunch is served
12:00 – "Probabilistic modeling and learning with small and noisy data: drug combination screens for precision oncology" by Manuela Zucknick (Professor, Institute of Basic Medical Sciences)
This event is open for all students, PhD candidates, postdocs, and everyone else who is interested in the topic. No registration needed.
About the seminar series
Once a month, dScience will invite you to join us for lunch and professional talks at the Science Library. In addition to these, we will serve lunch in our lounge in Kristine Bonnevies house every Thursday. Due to limited space (40 people), this will be first come, first served. See how to find us here.
Our lounge can also be booked by PhDs and Postdocs on a regular basis, whether it is for a meeting or just to hang out – we have fresh coffee all day long!