Researchers develop most complete genetic profile of acute myeloid leukemia

A team of researchers have developed a complete genetic profile of acute myeloid leukemia

Researchers at Brown University have developed the "most complete" genetic profile of acute myeloid leukemia through the use of powerful algorithms.
Reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, it was explained that the scientists hope the breakthrough will lead to new treatments for the aggressive blood cancer.
A team from the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Computational Molecular Biology played a major role in making sense of the giant datasets needed for the study.
Two algorithms were involved in the research and used to single out important pathways that can become cancerous.
Dubbed the HotNet algorithm, the systems was able to pick out several networks that appear to be active in the genome of acute myeloid leukemia, with the same algorithm used in 2011 to identify networks important to ovarian cancer.
"For us as computational people, it's fun to push these algorithms and apply them to new data sets," said computer scientist Ben Raphael.
"At the same time, in analysing cancer data we hope that the algorithms produce actionable information that is clinically important," he added.