Marie-Laure Yaspo

Marie-Laure Yaspo heads an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for molecular genetics in Berlin (https://www.molgen.mpg.de/166100/Gene-Regulation-and-Systems-Biology-of-Cancer). She has a long standing expertise in the analysis of genes and genomes, coordinated the chromosome 21 effort within the Human Genome Project and published the first NGS-based transcriptome analysis of human cells. The Yaspo group focuses on cancer genomics and system biology of cancer, with a translational perspective for personalized medicine. The group has developed powerful integrative NGS analysis pipelines integrating genome and transcriptome information, promoting the use of RNAseq in tumor profilings. Marie-Laure Yaspo is involved in the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) generating and analysing transcriptomes of pediatric brain tumors (www.pedbraintumor.org) and early onset prostate cancer (https://icgc.org/icgc/cgp/70/345/53039), as well as in the Blueprint epigenome project (http://www.blueprint-epigenome.eu/).

Applying NGS technologies, the group is interested in dissecting molecular landscapes of tumors for identifying pathway components associated with malignancy and predictive biomarkers of drug response in patient-derived model systems such as organoids and xenografts. This approach recently led to the identification of novel biomakers of response to EGFR blockade in colorectal cancer within the EU Innovative Medicine Initiatives oncotrack project (www.oncotrack.eu). Marie-Laure Yaspo coordinates a pilot translational study on metastatic melanoma together with the Charite Comprehensive Cancer Center (Berlin) (Treat20plus-BMBF), integrating deep NGS analysis and in silico modeling of the tumor response for treatment recommendations. Besides, the group is developing NGS-based methods characterising immune cell repertoires.