Dr Dane Vassiliadis
Developing a single-cell resolution synthetic barcoding platform to identify markers of cancer progression and therapeutic resistance
Cellular barcoding using heritable synthetic barcodes coupled to high throughput sequencing, is a powerful technique for the accurate tracing of clonal lineages in a wide variety of biological contexts including development, reprogramming and cancer. Recently, we developed SPLINTR (Single-cell Profiling and LINeage TRacing), a cellular barcoding platform that links initial cellular states to their downstream cellular fates by integrating cellular barcoding information into single-cell and spatial transcriptomic readouts, extending the capabilities of these lineage tracing methods to the single-cell level. Here I will discuss our recent work utilising SPLINTR to understand how transcriptional heterogeneity impacts clonal dominance and therapeutic resistance in Acute Myeloid Leukaemia and our development of an open-source toolkit to facilitate the preprocessing, analysis, and visualisation of bulk and single-cell cellular barcoding datasets.
Dr Dane Vassiliadis
LLS Career Development Fellow, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre
Dr. Dane Vassiliadis is a postdoctoral scientist at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and a Leukaemia and Lymphoma Society USA Career Development Fellow. He studies the role that epigenetic factors play in the regulation of transcriptional programs and how aberrant regulation of these processes can drive the initiation, maintenance, and progression of cancer. He completed his undergraduate and PhD training at The University of Melbourne where he developed a research skillset encompassing Genetics and Bioinformatics. In the laboratory of Professor Mark Dawson, his current research employs cell and molecular biology, bioinformatics, functional genomics and immuno-oncology approaches to understand how therapeutic resistance develops in haematological malignancies, with a focus on Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. In particular, he is interested in how transcriptional pathways are aberrantly regulated in malignant cells and how this can initiate and maintain stable therapeutic resistance in the absence of new mutations to DNA. To date, his research contributions have been published in high impact journals including Nature, Science, Cancer Cell, Nature Medicine and Nature Communications. Dr. Vassiliadis also holds an honorary fellowship in the Sir Peter MacCallum Department of Oncology at The University of Melbourne.