Nuria Lopez-Bigas is a biologist with a PhD in molecular genetics of deafness. She transitioned into bioinformatics during his postdoc at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). Since 2006 she leads a research group in Barcelona focused on the study of cancer from a genomics perspective. She is particularly interested in the identification of cancer driver mutations, genes and pathways across tumor types and in the study of their targeted opportunities. Her lab has actively participated in the major cancer genomics projects, including the International Cancer Genomics Consortia (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Núria has taken leading roles within these initiatives.

Among the most important achievements obtained by Lopez-Bigas' lab are the development of pioneer methods to identify cancer driver genes (Oncodrive methods)(NAR 2012, Bioinformatics 2013, Genome Biology 2016), the creation of IntOGen (http://www.intogen.org), a discovery tool for cancer research (Nature Methods 2013), the obtention of a landscape of driver events and their therapeutic opportunities across close to 7000 tumours of 28 different cancer types (Cancer Cell 2015), and the discovery that DNA-bound proteins interfere with the nucleotide excision repair machinery, leading to increased rate of DNA mutations at the protein binding sites (Nature 2016).

RESEARCH LINES

Study of mutational processes in tumors.

Identification of cancer driver elements.

Translating cancer genomics findings into the clinic.