UT researchers create new technology to study tumor evolution

UT researchers have helped to better understand how tumor cells evolve to resist cancer treatments by developing ClonMapper, a new technology that tags the cells’ nucleic acid with a type of barcode.

By tagging the cells’ DNA with barcodes, lead researcher Aziz Al’Khafaji said researchers can now identify specific clones of cells to apply and test different drugs. He said researchers can then see how the cells react and monitor how they change.

“ClonMapper is this multifunctional tool that allows us to tag and track cancer cells and track their abundances over time,” Al’Khafaji said, “We can tell which particular clones or individual cancer cells that are more therapeutically resistant versus those that are susceptible to cancer treatment.”

Amy Brock, an associate professor of biomedical engineering, said ClonMapper has extreme potential because researchers can apply it to various tumors, such as acute biological leukemia, a cancer of blood cells, and cell types the team investigated.

Read more: https://thedailytexan.com/2021/08/26/ut-researchers-create-new-technology-to-study-tumor-evolution/


Juleanna Culilap