Endocrine Abstracts

The international cancer genome projects have provided comprehensive catalogs of molecular alterations in cancer and often led to new molecular tumor stratification. Furthermore, genome sequencing has provided an improved understanding of the mutational processes underlying cancer formation and progression. Interestingly, mutations in genes coding for chromosomal maintenance, DNA methylation and histone modification are frequent in many tumor entities. These epigenomic changes may be among the earliest alterations in cancer. By combining various orthogonal (e.g. genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic) data, the processes driving cancer might gradually become clearer. The presentation will highlight examples for the utilization of our recent high throughput molecular data aiming at the development of models how genomic and epigenomic changes can drive prostate cancer and how they can generate the enormous molecular heterogeneity of these tumors in space and time.

DOI: 10.1530/endoabs.42.IL14

Biographical details: Holger Sültmann graduated in Biochemistry from Tübingen University. After completing his PhD (1994) and postdoctoral studies in Molecular Evolutionary Genetics in the Division of Immunogenetics at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biology (Tübingen), he moved to the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, where he was an assistant professor in the Division of Molecular Genome Analysis (2000-2010). Since 2010, he has been heading the research group Cancer Genome Research at the DKFZ and the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT). In 2012, he was appointed full professor of the Medical Faculty at Heidelberg University.

His main research interest is the application of high throughput technologies to identify, characterize, and translate novel cancer biomarkers into the clinic. He has successfully launched and coordinated several interdisciplinary cancer genome research projects in the German Federal Program for Medical Genome Research. In 2010, he initiated the German ICGC project on prostate cancer genome sequencing.