American Statistical Association New York City Metropolitan Area Chapter Mailman School of Public Health Columbia University Department of Biostatistics Colloquium

In recent years numerous investigators have conducted genetic studies of pairs of tumor specimens from the same patient to determine whether the tumors share a clonal origin. These studies have the potential to be of considerable clinical significance, especially in clinical settings where the distinction of a new primary cancer and metastatic spread of a previous cancer would lead to radically different indications for treatment. Studies of clonality have typically involved comparison of the patterns of somatic mutations in the tumors at candidate genetic loci to see if the patterns are sufficiently similar to indicate a clonal origin. More recently, some investigators have explored the use of array CGH for this purpose. In this talk new statistical approaches to this problem will be presented that are suited to each of these types of data, along with the results of studies to examine the validity of the methods.