Research

The Center for Cancer Genomics (CCG) is part of the Precision Cancer Medicine effort at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Boston Children's Hospital. CCG's mission is to facilitate the design, execution, and analysis of cancer research projects through collaborations with investigators. We continually develop and adapt new technologies to accelerate discoveries in cancer genomics and apply these discoveries to improve personalized patient care.

The three main components of our mission are:

• Technology development: To develop new technologies for the analysis of cancer genomes.
• Collaborative research: To provide access to these genomic technologies to basic, translational, and clinical investigators at Dana-Farber and beyond.
• Translation: To translate technologies to the clinical setting.

We focus on the discovery of genomic alterations in human cancer and evaluation of their clinical significance for the informing diagnosis and treatment. We use Illumina next-generation sequencing platforms to perform bulk DNA and RNA sequencing. We also perform a variety of single-cell transcriptomic workflows using 10x Genomics and Illumina sequencing technologies. Using our workflows and expertise, we are able to detect a range of genomic alterations, including:

• Single nucleotide variants
• Insertions and deletions
• Chromosomal rearrangements: translocations, inversions, duplications
• Copy number changes
• Expression changes
• Allele-specific expression
• Detection and quantification of gene fusion
• Differential gene expression analysis
• Single-cell transcriptomics

An integral aspect of the Center's mission is working toward more effective clinical trial designs, in which patients with similar genetically defined cancers will receive drugs designed to target specific genetic aberrations. In addition to the principal areas indicated above, CCG is available to assist collaborators with funding (e.g., grant submissions), experimental design, and coordination of each project through the appropriate channels.

Collaborations Welcome

Our research and development group continuously evaluates and develops genomic technologies for both research and clinical use. From our inception, we have collaborated with research investigators to develop new genome discovery tools, and we welcome investigators and clinicians to contact us about new avenues of research that we can help facilitate. We provide a host of services that include project design, sequencing library construction, custom design and validation of hybrid capture gene panels for targeted sequencing, single-cell workflows, bioinformatic analysis, and more.