Help us congratulate Ze on his award! The complete excerpt on Ze is below, with the full list of award winners here.
2nd Prize: Hierarchical Tumor Immune Microenvironment Epigentic Deconvolution
Ze Zhang (Quantitative Biomedical Science, Epidemology) Advisor: Salas & Christensen
The complexity of the tumor microenvironment (TME) impedes the cost-effective deconvolution of TME cells with high resolution, accuracy, and specificity. We developed a novel tumor-type-specific hierarchical algorithm, HiTIMED, to deconvolve seventeen cell types in TME for twenty different carcinoma types using DNA methylation data in conjunction with the constrained projection quadratic programming approach. HiTIMED promises new avenues for the study of TME in assessing clinical outcomes. HiTIMED deconvolution is amenable to application in archival tumor biospecimens and provides a very cost-effective high-resolution cell composition profile enabling new opportunities to study the relation of the TME with etiologic factors, disease progression, and response to therapy.
Ze Zhang, John K. Wiencke, Karl T. Kelsey, Devin C. Koestler, Brock C. Christensen & Lucas A. Salas; HiTIMED: Hierarchical Tumor Immune Microenvironment Epigenetic Deconvolution for accurate cell type resolution in the tumor microenvironment using tumor-type-specific DNA methylation data; Cancer Research (Under review), May 2022