New Clinical professor – Joachim Weischenfeldt

Congratulations

It is with great pleasure that we can announce the appointment of Joachim Weischenfeldt as Clinical professor as at November 1, 2023

in clinical oncology with special focus on cancer genetics and structural variation

Joachim Weischenfeldt’s inaugural lecture will be announced shortly.

The Weischenfeldt Research Group uses computational and molecular biology approaches to understand the mutational processes and clonal evolution of cancer.

A crucial part of Joachim Weischenfeldt’s research is the close and synergistic collaboration with clinicians in the DCCC Brain Tumor Center.

Joachim Weischenfeldt has a special interest in genomic structural variations (SVs), which are frequently observed in aggressive brain tumours, but their aetiology and functional consequences are poorly understood.
With the overall aim to provide a better molecular understanding of resistance mechanisms and therapy opportunities in cancer patients, his future research will focus on three main themes,

            i) how SVs change 3D genome folding and organisation to cause aggressive disease,
            ii) Reconstruct clonal evoluion of complex SVs during and after therapy,
            iii) Dissect the influence of germline genetics on somatic alterations in cancer patients.

These themes have the potential to provide crucial insights into brain tumor initiation, progression, and heterogeneity to guide the development of improved patient stratification and targeted therapies.

Profile:
Joachim Weischenfeldt, group leader, since 2015, and he did his PhD at BRIC with Professor Bo T. Porse followed by postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Jan Korbel at EMBL, Heidelberg.

The interest of the lab spans different aspects of cancer genomics. A focus area is larger structural variants in cancer, their emergence and functional consequences on chromatin organization and how the evolve during tumour evolution.