Course The Biology and characteristic of circulating cell free DNA and circulating tumour DNA in health and disease

The course C304/03 The biology and characteristic of circulating cell free DNA and circulating tumor DNA in health and disease is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, 2023.

Criteria for participation: The course is constructed and executed such that both participants with medical and science/technology backgrounds will benefit from the course.

You must write a short application to be accepted for attendance at the course. This application shall state why the applicant wishes to attend, the level of background knowledge, and the purpose of taking the course. The size of the application is limited to 2500 characters (including spaces).  The purpose of the application is to enable prioritization of motivated applicants with urgent needs for the course.

Your application must be sent to Course administrator on mail: courses.nat.tech.he@au.dk before 10 March 2023.

Recommended knowledge for participation: Having basic knowledge about cancer, clinical cancer management, genomics, epigenomics, and molecular biology methods will be benefit, but is not a requirement.

Aim: To qualify the students to conduct circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) based research projects

Learning outcomes: 

• Basic knowledge of cell free DNA biology and markers of ctDNA.
• The necessary knowledge needed to avoid, or at least control for, biases introduced by pre-analytical processing.
• Basic understanding of the pros and cons of present state-of-the-art methods and technologies used to analyse cell free DNA (cfDNA) and ctDNA. To enable the student to choose the method/technology best suited in a given situation.
• Knowledge about the clinical situations where ctDNA may potentially be used to guide clinical decision making
• Knowledge about pros and cons of different cfDNA/ctDNA trial designs.
• To qualify the student to design and conduct their own cfDNA/ctDNA study

Workload: The full workload of the course is expected to be 25 hours

Content: Modules:

The biology of cell free and circulating tumor DNA: This module will provide the audience with a fundamental understanding of the biology of cell free and circulating tumor DNA and how working with these opens new possibilities in research and the clinic. The lectures will cover: The cellular origin of the cell free DNA circulating in plasma of healthy and diseased individuals (Somatic mosaism, Chronic/acute diseases, Cancer, Age), mechanisms of how DNA is released to the circulation, circulating cell free DNA and tumor DNA during the course of disease and strengths and weakness of markers of cfDNA and ctDNA, including: Methylation, Mutations, Copy number variations, Fragmentation patterns, Fragment size, Mitochondrial DNA copies, Microbiome DNA

Critical pre-analytical factors: The lectures will focus on relevant pre-analytical considerations for designing a clinical study. Issues regarding blood collection and processing of cfDNA will be addressed including the best time to draw blood, which vials to use, how to process and store samples, and how to purify cfDNA. The lectures will also cover QC strategies and measures.

Detection methods and interpretation of cfDNA and ctDNA measurements: This module will cover the detection and quantification of cfDNA/ctDNA with focus on both tumor and non-tumor informed approaches. The lectures will focus on: PCR based approaches for detecting circulating cell free/tumor DNA, next generation sequencing approaches e.g. multiplex PCR NGS, ultra-deep targeted sequencing, shallow whole genome sequencing, tumor-informed whole genome sequencing processing and QC controls, bioinformatics analysis of ctDNA measurements, interpretation of ctDNA results in clinical context (tumor and non-tumor informed) and multimarker and multianalyte strategies

Potential clinical application and implementation. These lectures will cover all the clinical focus areas address by the National Danish ctDNA research center: Early cancer detection, guiding adjuvant therapy decisions, risk stratified postoperative recurrence surveillance, monitoring ctDNA levels to predict therapy response, and identification of therapeutically actionable targets.

The lectures will focus on: Areas where ctDNA guided clinical decision making have potential to change clinical practice, Clinical trial design considerations, Examples of Danish and International trials exploring the clinical benefit of ctDNA guided clinical decision making. Considerations regarding clinical implementation, including cost/benefit and health economics

The course participants must present the designs and underlying considerations of the studies/trials they are preparing or working on.

The course participants will receive scientific papers to read before the course. These will introduce the participants to the vocabulary, biological terms and definitions, and methods of the field. By this it is ensured that all participants have the needed basic understanding of the field to get the full benefit of the course.

Instructors: 

Venue: Sandbjerg Estate, Sønderborg

Participation in the course is without cost for:

• PhD students, research-year students and research honours programme students from Health, Aarhus University
• PhD students enrolled at partner universities of the Nordoc collaboration. 
• PhD students from other institutions in the open market agreement for PhD courses.

Course fee:

• Others: DKK 761 incl. accommodation

Course dates:

• 22 May 2023 08:30 - 20:30
• 23 May 2023 09:00 - 16:00