Clonal selection meets single-cell DNA sequencing: unveiling hormonal adaptation and AI resistance in ER+ breast cancer

Dr. O’Mahony is a geneticist whose PhD at the Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics focused on breast cancer genetic epidemiology, including interpretation of BRCA1/2 VUS, novel methods for large case–control datasets, and Bayesian fine-mapping. Her postdoctoral work explores subclonal tumor reconstruction during aromatase inhibition, polygenic modeling for early risk and outcomes, and AI-driven pipelines for variant impact prediction. She is an active member of BCAC and serves on the International Genetic Epidemiology Society committee.

Vessela N. Kristensen is a Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo (UiO), and Director of Research and Head of the Division of Research and Development at the Department of Medical Genetics, Oslo University Hospital (OUS) and a visiting professor at Princeton University, Lewis Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and at Princeton Precision Health. Previously she has been professor I at the Institute for Clinical Medicine, campus Ahus (13 years) and Group Leader at the Department of Genetics, Institute for Cancer Research, Norwegian Radium Hospital (15 years), Professor II at the Centre for Integrative Genetics, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and Assistant Professor at National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda. She leads the EU-funded RESCUER project (RESistance Under Combinatorial Treatment in ER+ and ER- Breast Cancer), which brings together leading laboratory researchers and statisticians from across Europe. Her research topic is how genetic variation affects occurrence of somatic alterations, gene expression patterns and genome wide copy number alterations in human breast and ovarian tumors.