Unravelling resistance evolution using liquid biopsies

Research Project, 2025 – 2028

Resistance is a major problem in medicine today. It is why we cannot offer a lasting cure for many cancers: even if we use the most advanced treatment, there might be cells within the cancer that ignore the treatment and continue growing. So it is important to understand all the details of how resistance happens. There are still many unanswered questions about resistance, for example how quickly does it develops? what makes resistant cells resistant? how similar/different are two patients with the same type of cancer and treatment?

In this project, we aim to answer these questions using so-called liquid biopsies, pieces of the cancer’s DNA found in ordinary blood samples of a patient. Usually, we only know how a cancer looks when it’s discovered. Liquid biopsies help us follow it over time during therapy, with no extra discomfort for the patient. But liquid biopsies are different from usual cancer samples, so we cannot use our usual computer programs to analyse them. Therefore, in this project, we combine knowledge from bioinformatics, machine learning and mathematics to make new software and create a personalised computer-based simulation of a patient’s cancer from data from liquid biopsies. We apply this method to blood samples collected from a diverse set of cancer patients in the United Kingdom and Sweden. With our computer-based version of each cancer, we will be able to answer how and why resistance developed for that particular person. This knowledge will help clinicians in making better treatment plans and researchers in coming up with more effective cures for resistance.