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).
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 understanding the mutational processes leading to accumulation of mutations in tumors, the development of machine learning models to identify driver mutations in cancer genes applied to precision oncology, and the study of somatic mutations that lead to clonal expansions in normal tissues.
Selected publications
- Usset J, Rosendahl Huber A, Andrianova MA, Batlle E, Carles J, Cuppen E, Elez E, Felip E, Gómez-Rey M, Lo Giacco D, Martinez-Jimenez F, Muñoz-Couselo E, Siu LL, Tabernero J, Vivancos A, Muiños F, Gonzalez-Perez A, Lopez-Bigas N 2024, 'Five latent factors underlie response to immunotherapy', Nature Genetics, 56 - 2112 - 2120.
- Aya F, Lanuza-Gracia P, González-Pérez A, Bonnal S, Mancini E, López-Bigas N, Arance A & Valcárcel J 2024, 'Genomic deletions explain the generation of alternative BRAF isoforms conferring resistance to MAPK inhibitors in melanoma', Cell reports, 43 - 4 -114048.
- Riba, M et al. 2024, 'The 1+Million Genomes Minimal Dataset for Cancer', Nature genetics, 56 - 733 - 736.
- Demajo S, Ramis-Zaldivar JE, Muiños F, Grau ML, Andrianova M, López-Bigas N & González-Pérez A 2024, 'Identification of Clonal Hematopoiesis Driver Mutations through In Silico Saturation Mutagenesis', Cancer discovery, 14 - 9 - 1717 - 1731.
- Sanchez-Guixé M, Muinos F, Pinheiro-Santin M, Gonzalez-Huici V, Rodriguez-Hernandez CJ, Avgustinova A, Lavarino C, Gonzalez-Pérez A, Mora J & López-Bigas N 2024, 'Origins of Second Malignancies in Children and Mutational Footprint of Chemotherapy in Normal Tissues', Cancer discovery, 14 - 6 - 953 - 964.
Selected research activities
Elected member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences
Coordinator of the EU Funded Project CGI-Clinics: Data-driven cancer genome interpretation for personalised cancer treatment. Horizon Europe HORIZON-HLTH-2021-CARE-05. 2022-2027.
Co-leader of the CancerGrendChallenge funded project: PROMINENT: Discovering the molecular signatures of cancer PROMotion to INform prevENTion. Cancer GrandChallenges. Co-funded by CRUK, NIH and AECC.