Inigo Martincorena

Inigo is a group leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, investigating somatic mutations in normal tissues, cancer, and ageing.

In 2015, Inigo and his team published the first comprehensive description of somatic mutation and selection in a healthy solid tissue, revealing that human skin is a patchwork of thousands of competing clones carrying cancer-driver mutations. His current research focuses on understanding the extent of somatic evolution in normal tissues, including developing new methods to study somatic mutagenesis at single-molecule resolution, studies exploring the impact of somatic mutation in diseases unrelated to cancer, and forays into somatic mutation in other species.

Inigo received his MS in Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Navarra and his PhD in Evolutionary Genomics from the University of Cambridge and EBI-EMBL. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.