Cancer is a group of diseases that is driven by genetic alterations which accumulate in our cells throughout our entire lifetime.
Over the past two decades, researchers have compiled a comprehensive catalogue of all the mutations that can be found in human cancers. This tremendous effort revealed, that out of the more than twenty-thousand total human genes, only a few hundred are recurrently mutated in cancer.
The major challenge that lies ahead of us now, is to make functional sense of the identified mutations. This is where we come in. We develop and implement cutting-edge CRISPR genome engineering technologies to reversely engineer cancer mutations into the genes of cultured human cells, in order to study their functional impact on tumor development in-vitro. In our lab we combine CRISPR technologies and computational approaches to translate genetic information into novel therapeutic strategies which will ultimately benefit patients that suffer from cancer.
Junior Professor and Research Group were financed by the European Social Fund (ESF) as part of the International Research Network HAL-OX.
