NVIDIA Foundation Awards $400,000 to Cancer Researchers
The road less traveled. That describes how two research teams are approaching the fight against cancer, using GPU-accelerated computing and deep learning to explore new genetic pathways for clues to more effective treatments.
Each will receive a $200,000 Compute the Cure cancer research grant from the NVIDIA Foundation, our employee-led philanthropic arm, to further their research.
One team is building on its surprising discovery that many of the most potent “driver” genes — the culprits for cancer progression — aren’t located on the chromosomes, where scientists normally search for them, but on circular pieces of extrachromosomal DNA, or ecDNA.
The researchers, led by Dr. Paul Mischel of the Ludwig Cancer Research Institute, in San Diego, plan to use high performance computing and GPU-accelerated deep learning to understand these genes and their role in cancer.
The other team, from the University of Toronto (U of T), will use GPU-accelerated deep learning and DNA sequencing data to rapidly build a cancer’s “family tree” — revealing the mutations turning healthy cells into malignant tumors, and enabling us to predict how they’ll evolve.
The grants are part of the NVIDIA Foundation’s Compute the Cure effort, which supports researchers using innovative computing techniques to yield breakthroughs in cancer diagnostics and treatment.
A group of NVIDIA employees, with the support of researchers at the National Cancer Institute, chose the recipients from among nearly 70 proposals submitted from around the world.
For Paul Mischel, the fight’s personal — he was 14 when he lost his father to cancer.
“I became a pathologist to look the enemy in the eye,” said Mischel, the head of Molecular Pathology at the Ludwig Cancer Research and a professor of pathology at University of California, San Diego.
In February, Mischel and his UCSD colleague,Vineet Bafna, found that driver genes in more than half of human cancers are located outside the chromosome on ecDNA. These genes mutate more quickly than other types, so they’re more likely to become resistant to drugs and harder to treat.
“These cancers changed at a rate that made no sense. It was all happening way too fast,” Mischel said.
