Identifying and characterizing gene co-expression modules underlying tumour progression and drug resistance

During the transition to multicellular life, our cells acquired new ways to communicate with each other to transition from cell-level fitness to organism-level fitness. Communication between these genes is often disrupted in cancer allowing tumours to lose features of multicellularity and exhibit behaviors more commonly associated with unicellular life such as rapid cell division, selfish accumulation of nutrients and immortality. We are using a computational approach to investigate how features of multicellularity are broken down during multiple stages of cancer progression to build a comprehensive molecular landscape of cancer progression, which is immensely valuable for the development of more robust therapeutic strategies.