Serena Nik-Zainal

Mutational signatures are patterns of mutations in cancer genomes, that arise because of the processes that have gone awry as a cell turned from being a normal cell into a cancer cell. Over the last decade this field has grown substantially, thanks to the enormous increase in scale offered by whole genome sequencing (WGS) projects. In this talk, I will present some new developments in this field of mutational signatures. Using the breast cancers from the 100,000 Genomes Project, which is the largest cohort of WGS breast cancers to date, I will show how integrating our new mutational signature insights with national mortality statistics can provide intelligence that was not appreciable previously, and that could make a substantial difference in how we perform clinical trials, transforming the speed and scale to accelerate how we get the right drugs to the right patients at the right time, more effectively.