Molecular Digestive Oncology

The laboratory for Molecular Digestive Oncology focusses on gastro-intestinal cancers and currently has two types of activities:

• large molecular annotation projects, aimed at better describing the overall molecular identity of GI tumors and potential subtypes. Activities here include in depth molecular annotation of tumor series, state of the art bioinformatics for subtype derivation and biological annotation, comparisons of primary and metastatic lesions to study drift and intra patient heterogeneity. These activities are aimed at increasing our understanding of the disease and at providing the clinical and drug developer community a more differentiated map and stratification factors for targeted trials. We work closely with the EORTC, NCI and pharma to implement these findings. In terms of predictive markers we have focused on the EGFR pathway inhibitors and more recently on anti angiogenesis markers.
• basic cell biology and functional work: we run functional studies on candidate genes/pathways from above to better understand their role in colon cancer and potential therapeutic targeting. Currently we work on the phosphatase PTPRO phosphatase, the EGFR ligand Epiregulin, BRAF signaling, Zic2 and syntenins.