Research programme 03

Cancer behaviour and patient stratification

We examine how altered p53-isoform expression affects tumour invasion, treatment response and patient outcome.

Tumours sharing the same TP53 mutation status can behave differently. The lab investigates how altered expression of specific isoforms changes cancer-cell behaviour.

This work supports a more complete way of stratifying patients by combining mutation status with the isoform repertoire, its ratios and functional consequences.

Tumor distribution, median age of breast cancer diagnosis, and estimated penetrance’s are shown for carriers of pathogenic p53 DNA-binding domain variants (left) and the variant encoding p53α p.Arg337His (middle) compared to TP53-stop-lost (right).

Approaches

Patient-cohort biomarker analysis
Cancer invasion and treatment-response models
Isoform-resolved expression profiling
Familial cancer genetics

Selected work

TP53 drives invasion through its Δ133p53β variant (2016)
Elevated p53β variants and survival in melanoma (2023)
Germline variant affecting p53β isoforms predisposes to familial cancer (2024)

Next programme Diagnostics and therapeutic translation →