OICR PhD candidate developed a computational tool to classify cells in the tumour microenvironment.

Ido Nofech-Mozes hopes the tool he created can help answer some important questions about cancer.

Nofech-Mozes is a University of Toronto PhD candidate based in Dr. Sagi Abelson and Dr. Philip Awadalla’s labs at OICR. He recently created scATOMIC, a computational method that uses data from single-cell RNA sequencing to classify the different cells in a tumour microenvironment.

For a given tumour, scATOMIC can identify the types of cancer cells, immune cells and other cells that are present. Nofech-Mozes hopes the tool can enable large-scale studies to better understand cancer at a cellular level, and bring about more personalized treatment for people with cancer.

“I’ve learned that every cancer patient can be thought of as having their own unique disease and having their own unique set of challenges,” he says. “The variation between cancer patients is really putting an emphasis on why we need a more personalized, precision approach to cancer therapy.”