Our research group investigates and develops innovative biomarkers to advance cancer diagnosis, classification and monitoring. We are primarily focused on exploring the role of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) as a non-invasive biomarker in body fluids, where it reflects the tumor burden and mutational profile of tumors, thus providing a powerful tool to study tumor evolution, treatment response, and help classify tumor entities. To ensure comprehensive characterization and ultrasensitive detection of ctDNA, we employ several innovative next-generation sequencing strategies that require sophisticated bioinformatics approaches. We use the de.NBI Cloud to process our samples from different studies and experimental approaches, including targeted sequencing of ctDNA isolated from different biological analytes, whole genome sequencing to study fragmentomics and CNV profiles of different tumor entities, applying machine learning algorithms to classify brain cancer entities, and exploring spatiotemporal characteristics of tumor samples. The de.NBI cloud is an essential, robust, and powerful tool to achieve our scientific goals, greatly expanding the computational resources that facilitate processing a large number of samples in parallel and opening the way to develop complex artificial intelligence models to build classifiers based on large datasets. Therefore, we rely on high RAM and many compute cores from the de.NBI cloud, and at the same time on the trustworthy privacy policies of the de.NBI system and the experience of the helpful de.NBI team.
