Moritz Gerstung
Group Leader
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Germany
Biography
Moritz Gerstung leads a research group at EMBL-EBI investigating the underlying mechanisms of cancer development and seeking to understand the differences in therapy success and outcomes in different individuals. His team develops statistical models for relating different layers of genomic, molecular and clinical data to establish connections between genotype and phenotype, and tools to predict outcomes based on comprehensive, high-dimensional datasets. The group also explores the evolutionary dynamics of cancer. He has a PhD in Computational Biology from ETH Zurich (2012), and carried out postdoctoral work at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (2012-2015). Moritz joined EMBL-EBI as a Research group leader in August 2015
Research Interest
Cancer is a genetic disease caused by mutations to the genome. When such mutations hit critical genetic elements, they perturb cellular signalling resulting in overly proliferative cells. The availability of cheap sequencing technologies has led to large international efforts such as the International Cancer Genome Consortium for charting the genomic lesions leading to cancer. A revelation of these projects was an even greater genomic complexity of cancer genomes than previously anticipated: Despite having the same disease each patient harbours a unique constellation of mutations. The genetic complexity of cancer is a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. A challenge to understand the underlying mechanisms of cancer development - and an opportunity for finding an explanation for differences in therapy success and outcome.
Publications
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Gerstung M, Pellagatti A, Malcovati L, et al. (2015) Combining gene mutation with gene expression data improves outcome prediction in myelodysplastic syndromes. Nature Communications, 6:5901
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E. Papaemmanuil, M. Gerstung, L. Bullinger, et al. (2016). Genomic Classification and Prognosis in Acute Myeloid Leukemia. N Engl J Med, 374:2209-21.
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M. Gerstung, E. Papaemmanuil, I. Martincorena, et al. (2017). Precision oncology for acute myeloid leukemia using a knowledge bank approach. Nat Genet, 49:332-340.
