Research
Our research is focused on the study of cancer from a genomics perspective. We are particularly interested in the identification of cancer driver mutations, genes and pathways across tumour types and in the study of the mutational processes across tissues and genomic regions.
Finding drivers of cancer
Cancer is mainly a genetic disease. It is caused by genomic alterations that confer somatic cells competitive advantages over neighbouring cells in the same tissue. The genes affected by these alterations are commonly referred to as cancer drivers because they drive the abnormal growth of malignant cells. Recently, important international initiatives have sequenced the exomes and genomes of thousands of tumours belonging to different types of cancer. One of the main goals of the colossal effort channelled into this endeavour is the identification of cancer driver genes and, more recently, also potential driver non-coding genomic elements, such as promoters, enhancers, and non-coding RNAs.
Given that genomic alterations in driver genomic elements are positively selected in the course of tumorigenesis, an effective approach to detect these elements is to find signals of positive selection in their mutational patterns. In recent years, as part of the aforementioned initiatives, we have built bioinformatics tools to identify genomic elements that bear signals of positive selection in their mutational patterns across cohorts of tumours. We call this suite of methods Oncodrives. Using a combination of some of these methods, and others on large pan-cancer cohorts of tumours, we produce comprehensive and reliable catalogues of cancer driver genes. This information is available online at intogen.org
