Núria López-Bigas

Institut de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona (IRB Barcelona)

Life & Medical Sciences

Núria López-Bigas has a PhD in Biology from the University of Barcelona and has expertise in Medical Genetics and in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. During her PhD work, she studied the molecular causes of hereditary deafness at the group of Xavier Estivill. Next she moved to the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton (Cambridge, UK) to work on Computational Genomics at the group of Christos A. Ouzounis and then at the Center for Regulatory Genomics (Barcelona) at the group of Roderic Guigó. Núria joined the Pompeu Fabra University in April 2006 with a Ramón y Cajal Position, was appointed ICREA Research Professor in October 2011 and her lab moved to Institute for Research in Biomedicine in November 2016. She leads the Biomedical Genomics Research Group (http://bbglab.irbbarcelona.org). In 2015 she has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant.


Research interests

Núria López-Bigas research is 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.

Among the most important achievements obtained by Lopez-Bigas’ lab are the development of pioneer methods to identify driver genes (Oncodrive methods), the creation of IntOGen (http://www.intogen.org), a discovery tool for cancer research, the obtention of a landscape of driver events and their therapeutic opportunities across close to 7000 tumours of 28 different cancer types (Rubio-Perez et al, 2015), and the discovery that protein-bound DNA impairs nucleotide excision repair (Radhakrishnan et al., 2016).

Selected publications

– Sabarinathan R, Mularoni L, Deu-Pons J, Gonzalez-Perez A & López-Bigas N 2016, ‘Nucleotide excision repair is impaired by binding of transcription factors to DNA’, Nature, 532, 7598, 264.

– Frigola J, Iturbide A, Lopez-Bigas N, Peiro S & Gonzalez-Perez A 2016, ‘Altered oncomodules underlie chromatin regulatory factors driver mutations’, Oncotarget, 7, 21, 30748 – 30759.

– Iorio F, Knijnenburg TA, Vis DJ, Bignell GR, Menden MP, Schubert M, Aben N, Goncalves E, Barthorpe S, Lightfoot H, Cokelaer T, Greninger P, van Dyk E, Chang H, de Silva H, Heyn H, Deng X, Egan RK, Liu Q, Mironenko T, Mitropoulos X, Richardson L, Wang J, Zhang T, Moran S, Sayols S, Soleimani M, Tamborero D, Lopez-Bigas N, Ross-Macdonald P, Esteller M, Gray NS, Haber DA, Stratton MR, Benes CH, Wessels LFA, Saez-Rodriguez J, McDermott U & Garnett MJ 2016, ‘A Landscape of Pharmacogenomic Interactions in Cancer’, Cell, 166, 3, 740 – 754.

– Mularoni L, Sabarinathan R, Deu-Pons J, Gonzalez-Perez A & Lopez-Bigas N 2016, ‘OncodriveFML: a general framework to identify coding and non-coding regions with cancer driver mutations’, Genome Biology, 17, 128.

– Rubio-Perez C, Deu-Pons J, Tamborero D, Lopez-Bigas N & Gonzalez-Perez 2016, ‘Rational design of cancer gene panels with OncoPaD’, Genome Medicine, 8, 98.


Selected research activities

  • XI Banco Sabadell Foundation Award for Biomedical Research
  • ERC Consolidator Grant 682398. 2016-2021
  • PI of a grant from Asociación Española Contra el Cancer (AECC), 2016-2021
  • Keynote speaker at European Conference on Computational Biology 2016, 2-9 September 2016, The Hague (Netherlands)