Human malignant neoplastic diseases have been extensively characterized by functional genomics approaches during the past decade, allowing the identification of different cancer molecular subtypes and the development of prognostic and predictive biomarkers. However, no studies have been reported comprehensively screening for the mutational and transcriptomic profiles of AIDS-associated malignancies (AM). The three interrelated projects of the U54 will employ the Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) platform to perform mutational and transcriptomics studies of AM biopsies as well as in-vitro and in vivo tumor studies using different murine models and cancer cell lines. Detailed unraveling of the AM genome coupled with a deeper understanding of its transcriptome and their viral associated factors will be instrumental to understand the molecular mechanisms and pathways that govern the progression of these neoplastic lesions. We will create a bilateral Oncogenomics (located at UM, USA) and Bioinformatics (located at UNLP, Argentina) Core (OGB) that will provide investigators access to resources not currently available for the Argentina Labs and centers investigators. The bilateral OGB-Core facility will be in charge of the design, generation, pre-processing, statistical and data mining analysis of the functional genomics data generated by the NGS platform available at OGB Core. The genomic data and clinical data will be centralized at the core server providing unified functional genomics resources that will serve as hub for coordinating converging approaches. Furthermore, the OGB Core will provide training to all junior scientists, Argentina investigators from the network as well as new investigators attracted via Pilots program offered by the U54 Consortium.
