Gyorgy Szabadkai (UCL Department of Cell and Developmental Biology) together with Robert Stein (UCLH, UCL Cancer Institute) and Mariia Yuneva (Francis Crick Institute) and Kevin Bryson (UCL Computer Sciences) as CoI, has received a Wellcome Trust Pathfinder Award to develop a mitochondrial gene expression based biomarker to inform on chemosensitivity of luminal breast tumours.

The grant will fund a postdoctoral bioinformatician/cell biologist to develop and carry out initial validation of a novel bioinformatic approach to classify luminal breast cancers according to their nuclear encoded mitochondrial gene expression profiles. The team will test the hypothesis that the classification informs on chemosensitivity of these tumours using patient material and in vivo models. The classification method is based on the massively correlated biclustering (MCBiclust) algorithm previously developed by Robert Bentham in COMPLeX under the supervision of GS and KB (see preprint here).