Publications by authors named "Boutros P"

The sex chromosomes contain complex, important genes impacting medical phenotypes, but differ from the autosomes in their ploidy and large repetitive regions. To enable technology developers along with research and clinical laboratories to evaluate variant detection on male sex chromosomes X and Y, we create a small variant benchmark set with 111,725 variants for the Genome in a Bottle HG002 reference material. We develop an active evaluation approach to demonstrate the benchmark set reliably identifies errors in challenging genomic regions and across short and long read callsets.

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Globally, prostate cancer is the second most common malignancy in males, with over 400 thousand men dying from the disease each year. A common treatment modality for localized prostate cancer is radiotherapy. However, up to half of high-risk patients can relapse with radiorecurrent prostate cancer, the aggressive clinical progression of which remains severely understudied.

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Somatic mosaicism is an important cause of disease, but mosaic and somatic variants are often challenging to detect because they exist in only a fraction of cells. To address the need for benchmarking subclonal variants in normal cell populations, we developed a benchmark containing mosaic variants in the Genome in a Bottle Consortium (GIAB) HG002 reference material DNA from a large batch of a normal lymphoblastoid cell line. First, we used a somatic variant caller with high coverage (300x) Illumina whole genome sequencing data from the Ashkenazi Jewish trio to detect variants in HG002 not detected in at least 5% of cells from the combined parental data.

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Reference genomes are foundational to modern genomics. Our growing understanding of genome structure leads to continual improvements in reference genomes and new genome "builds" with incompatible coordinate systems. We quantified the impact of genome build on germline and somatic variant calling by analyzing tumour-normal whole-genome pairs against the two most widely used human genome builds.

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Background And Objective: The etiology of prostate cancer (PC) is multifactorial and poorly understood. It has been suggested that colibactin-producing Escherichia coli positive for the pathogenicity island pks (pks) initiate cancers via induction of genomic instability. In PC, androgens promote oncogenic translocations.

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Objective: This scoping review aims to identify risk factors for COPD and asthma, examine the burden and intervention measures, and clarify the findings in the context of climate change, with a particular focus on LMICs.

Methods: Following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, we conducted a scoping review using PubMed, Embase, and Scopus, focusing on studies published from 2011 to 2024.

Results: Our review included 52 studies that encompassed 244,004 participants.

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Optimizing prevention and early detection of cancer requires understanding the number, types and timing of driver mutations. To quantify this, we exploited the elevated cancer incidence and mutation rates in germline and carriers. Using novel statistical models, we identify genomic deletions as the likely rate-limiting mutational processes, with 1-3 deletions required to initiate breast and ovarian tumors.

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We developed and evaluated the Digital Platform for Exercise (DPEx): a decentralized, patient-centric approach designed to enhance all aspects of clinical investigation of exercise therapy. DPEx integrated provision of a treadmill with telemedicine and remote biospecimen collection permitting all study procedures to be conducted in patient's homes. Linked health biodevices enabled high-resolution monitoring of lifestyle and physiological response.

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There are myriad types of biomedical data-molecular, clinical images, and others. When a group of patients with the same underlying disease exhibits similarities across multiple types of data, this is called a subtype. Existing subtyping approaches struggle to handle diverse data types with missing information.

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Pretreatment prognostication, on-treatment monitoring, and early detection of physiological symptoms are considerable challenges in cancer. We describe the feasibility of high-resolution wearable data (steps per day, walking speed) to longitudinally profile physiological trajectories extracted from Apple Health data in three patients with lung cancer from diagnosis through cancer treatment after obtaining informed consent. We used descriptive statistics to describe our approach of building longitudinal physiological profiles.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Sarcomas are rare tumors with over 100 subtypes, making it challenging to find effective therapies; there's a need for personalized treatment approaches to enhance patient outcomes.
  • - Patient-derived tumor organoids (PDTOs) were used to study drug resistance and sensitivity in sarcoma, analyzing 194 specimens from 126 patients across 24 subtypes.
  • - The research developed a high-throughput screening method that provided results quickly and showed that drug sensitivity linked to tumor characteristics; 59% of samples matched with at least one effective FDA-approved treatment.
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Background And Objective: We characterized tumor prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) levels as a reflection of cancer biology and treatment sensitivities for treatment-naïve prostate cancer.

Methods: We first correlated PSMA positron emission tomography (PET) maximum standardized uptake values (SUVmax) in primary prostate cancer with tumor FOLH1 (PSMA RNA abundance) to establish RNA as a proxy (n = 55). We then discovered and validated molecular pathways associated with PSMA RNA levels in two large primary tumor cohorts.

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Article Synopsis
  • Advances in DNA sequencing technology have made it faster and more affordable, leading to improved data availability and the need for complex algorithms and workflows.
  • Metapipeline-DNA is a customizable and flexible analysis pipeline that handles various processing tasks like read alignment, variant calling, and quality control, making it easier to analyze DNA sequencing data.
  • This open-source tool is available under the GPLv2 license and can be accessed for free at https://github.com/uclahs-cds/metapipeline-DNA.
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Article Synopsis
  • Extracellular vesicles (EVs), including large oncosomes (LO), vary in size and function, with LO released by aggressive tumor cells being a significant focus of this study.
  • The research presents the first comprehensive quantitative proteomic analysis of LO and small EVs from different cancer types (prostate, breast, glioma), integrating data from both cancer cell samples and the plasma of metastatic prostate cancer patients.
  • Findings indicate that proteins found in LO correlate with disease progression, and single EV RNA sequencing supports the effectiveness of applying single-cell technologies to EV research, laying the groundwork for future liquid biopsy applications.
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Multifocal prostate cancer is a prevalent phenomenon, with most cases remaining uncharacterized from a genomic perspective. A patient presented with bilateral prostate cancer. On systematic biopsy, two indistinguishable clinicopathologic lesions were detected.

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Background: Metastatic relapse of prostate cancer after radiotherapy is a significant cause of prostate cancer-related morbidity and mortality. PLOD2 is a mediator of invasion and metastasis that we identified as being upregulated in our highly aggressive radiorecurrent prostate cancer cell line.

Methods: Patient dataset analysis was conducted using a variety of prostate cancer cohorts.

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Unlabelled: Prostate cancer is frequently treated with radiotherapy. Unfortunately, aggressive radioresistant relapses can arise, and the molecular underpinnings of radioresistance are unknown. Modern clinical radiotherapy is evolving to deliver higher doses of radiation in fewer fractions (hypofractionation).

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Background: Localized prostate tumors show significant spatial heterogeneity, with regions of high-grade disease adjacent to lower grade disease. Consequently, prostate cancer biopsies are prone to sampling bias, potentially leading to underestimation of tumor grade. To study the clinical, epidemiologic, and molecular hallmarks of this phenomenon, we conducted a prospective study of grade upgrading: differences in detected prostate cancer grade between biopsy and surgery.

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Background And Objective: There is no consensus on de-escalation of monitoring during active surveillance (AS) for prostate cancer (PCa). Our objective was to determine clinical criteria that can be used in decisions to reduce the intensity of AS monitoring.

Methods: The global prospective AS cohort from the Global Action Plan prostate cancer AS consortium was retrospectively analyzed.

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Motivation: Software is vital for the advancement of biology and medicine. Impact evaluations of scientific software have primarily emphasized traditional citation metrics of associated papers, despite these metrics inadequately capturing the dynamic picture of impact and despite challenges with improper citation.

Results: To understand how software developers evaluate their tools, we conducted a survey of participants in the Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR) program funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

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Importance: Observational data have shown that postdiagnosis exercise is associated with reduced risk of prostate cancer death. The feasibility and tumor biological activity of exercise therapy is not known.

Objective: To identify recommended phase 2 dose of exercise therapy for patients with prostate cancer.

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Purpose: To characterize the relationship between Decipher genomic classifier scores and prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT)-based metastatic spread.

Materials And Methods: We identified patients from four institutions who underwent PSMA PET/CT scans pretreatment for primary staging or postradical prostatectomy (RP) for suspected recurrence and had Decipher transcriptomic data available from biopsy or RP specimens. PSMA PET/CT-based patterns of spread were classified as localized (miT + N0M0) or nonlocalized (miN1M0 or miM1a-c).

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Comprehensive N6-methyladenosine (m6A) epitranscriptomic profiling of primary tumors remains largely uncharted. Here, we profiled the m6A epitranscriptome of 10 nonneoplastic lung tissues and 51 lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) tumors, integrating the corresponding transcriptomic, proteomic, and extensive clinical annotations. We identified distinct clusters and genes that were exclusively linked to disease progression through m6A modifications.

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