American Statistical Association New York City Metropolitan Area Chapter Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Biostatistics Seminar

Cancer patients often develop multiple malignancies that may be either metastatic spread of a previous cancer or new primary cancers. This distinction is of considerable clinical and biological significance. If diagnosis cannot be made easily on the basis of pathology review, the patterns of somatic mutations in the tumors can be compared. Previously we developed statistical methods for testing clonality of two tumors using their loss of heterozygosity (LOH) profiles at several candidate markers. In this talk, I will discuss how to extend these methods to three and more malignancies from the same patient. Non-parametric and parametric methods will be considered, and I will present the results of simulation studies.