Somatic mutations across normal tissues: past, present, future
Tim Coorens
Group leader at the EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute, UK.
Theatre room, CiMUS
About
Somatic mutations play a crucial role in the origin of cancer and other diseases, but a fundamental understanding of the frequency, type and patterns of mutations across healthy human tissues has been limited until recently. In this talk, I will review what we now know about the causes, patterns and consequences of somatic genetic variation across normal human tissues and outline the plans of the newly established Somatic Mosaicism across Human Tissues (SMaHT) Network.
Bio
Dr Tim Coorens holds an MPhil degree in Computational Biology from the University of Cambridge and a BSc degree from University College Utrecht. He earned his PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where he studied somatic mutations in human development and childhood cancers. He continued this research as a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, working with Gad Getz and Kristin Ardlie. His work focuses on detecting somatic mutations and reconstructing cell lineages to understand the transition from normal to cancerous tissue. In 2025, he established his research group at EMBL-EBI, the "Somatic evolution and phylogenetics" group, to further explore somatic mutations in human biology and disease.
Hosted by Jose Tubío, Mobile Genomes Group, CiMUS
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