Activity Detail
Seminar
An evolutionary epigenomic take to cancer research
Isabel Mendizabal
My academic journey towards the study of cancer has been rather curvy. In this talk I will give an overview of the lessons from evolutionary genomics and disease epigenomics fields that have shaped my vision of cancer. I will argue that an evolutionary lens is critical to understand every biological process including complex disease etiology. My past research shows that integrative multi-omic approaches coupled with an evolutionary perspective provide new mechanistic links to complex disease biology. My current research in prostate cancer exploits large-scale molecular datasets from well characterized clinical cohorts to understand the role of tumor-intrinsic and tumor microenvironmental factors in disease progression. Some of these findings challenge the current dogma of cancer evolution.