Inigo Martincorena

Inigo Martincorena is a Group Leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he leads the Martincorena Group focused on somatic evolution research within the Cancer, Ageing and Somatic Mutation Programme. His career path includes positions as a CRUK Career Development Fellow, Research Fellow at Queens' College, University of Cambridge, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sanger Institute, demonstrating his deep integration within the academic research community.

Dr. Martincorena's research centers on understanding somatic mutation and evolution in normal tissues and its implications for cancer development and ageing. His groundbreaking work has revealed that human tissues are mosaics of thousands of competing clones carrying cancer-driver mutations, fundamentally changing our understanding of early cancer development. His group has published seminal studies on somatic mutation landscapes in normal skin, esophagus, bladder, and other tissues, showing that these processes are widespread across human tissues. The Martincorena Group combines genome sequencing, laser capture microscopy, and computational data analysis to investigate somatic mutation dynamics, with current work focusing on characterizing somatic mutation in healthy tissues, exploring the role of somatic mutation in ageing and disease, studying somatic mutation in other species, and developing new experimental and computational methods.

Among his notable scientific achievements, Dr. Martincorena holds the prestigious CRUK Career Development Fellowship and has developed dNdScv, an evolutionary method to study selection in cancer and somatic evolution that has become widely used in the field. His research has been published in top-tier journals including Nature, Science, and Cell, with multiple highly cited papers that have reshaped understanding of somatic evolution in normal tissues.

Dr. Martincorena leads a research group within the Cancer, Ageing and Somatic Mutation Programme at the Sanger Institute, collaborating with numerous researchers and institutions worldwide. His group's work has significant implications for understanding cancer development, improving early detection methods, and potentially developing new approaches to prevent cancer. The Martincorena Group continues to push the boundaries of somatic mutation research with innovative methodologies and comprehensive analyses of normal tissue genomics.