What causes cancer mutations?

Every person’s tumour tells a story—our lifestyle habits, our microbes, even our immune system shape the tumour’s DNA and can leave marks. We aim to discover and study such marks to understand how cancer develops.

Our discoveries so far:

• Discovered a mutational pattern linked to dietary habits, in particular red meat intake.
• Identified a subpopulation that is particularly susceptible to DNA damage from such habits.
• Assessed the long-term effects of smoking on the colorectal cancer genomes.

In collaborations, we also assessed how alcohol and certain bacterial strains leave mutational marks.

How can tumor mutations guide treatment?

Cancer immunotherapies are transforming treatment, yet not all patients respond the same way. Studying the mutational landscape of tumors can inform the best course of treatment and predict aggressiveness.

Our discoveries so far:

• Resistance to immunotherapy: identified intrinsic resistance to immune checkpoint blockade in mismatch repair–deficient colorectal cancer.
• Hidden cancers: clinically and genomically characterized interval colorectal cancers across three prospective cohorts.
• Germline predisposition to oncogenic alkylating damage in colorectal cancer.

We have also contributed to studies on how tumor cells change after treatment, and how specific genetic contexts influence sensitivity to therapy.

Novel experimental and computational methods

We work closely with clinicians and physicists to push the boundaries of how cancer is studied. Together, we are developing new approaches to:

• Map the spatial architecture of tumors—understanding how cancer cells interact with their surroundings within tissues; to do so, we engineer tools.
• Reveal hidden microbial signals in tumor data—creating better ways to detect and analyze microbes that may influence cancer development.

These tools help answer fundamental questions about cancer biology and provide the community with new methods to accelerate discovery.