1st TCGA India Conference and Workshop : 2019
During September 20-25, 2019, Prashanti Cancer Care Mission, IISER Pune, and Persistent Systems organized the first ever TCGA themed conference in India titled “Multi-omics Profiling of Cancers: Lessons from the TCGA”.
About TCGA
TCGA is a landmark cancer genomics collaboration between the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) that has generated comprehensive, multi-dimensional maps of the key genomic changes in cancer. TCGA has molecularly characterized over 20,000 primary cancer and matched normal samples spanning 33 cancer types. The TCGA dataset, comprising more than two petabytes of multi-omics data such as whole genome sequencing, copy number variation, transcriptome and methylome, has been made publicly available.
Dr. Jean Claude Zenklusen (TCGA) led a team of NCI-TCGA domain experts who served as conference faculty in addition to reputed cancer researchers from India and abroad. Over 350 delegates comprising onco-clinicians, basic researchers, bioinformaticians, geneticists, translational researchers, big data scientists, bioethicists and regulatory experts attended the event (http://ctcr.in/tcga2019/).
The major theme of the scientific proceedings was understanding the impact of TCGA project on translational cancer research along with latest trends in the field. In their keynote addresses, Dr. Shekhar Mande (DG-CSIR, GoI) and Dr. Renu Swaroop (Secretary, DBT, GoI) highlighted the need for translational cancer research in the Indian context for identifying molecular profiles of Indian cancers considering the increasing cancer burden, unique clinicopathological profiles and intrinsic population diversity. A consensus emerged between all faculty members and attendees that multi-omics profiling of Indian cancers represents an unmet medical need. Hence, an Indian national cancer research project, themed on the TCGA model was deemed timely and pertinent.
Flyer for the conference is available here
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