Guest speaker at ICR: Ellen Heitzer

On Thursday 15 October, The Institute of Cancer Research will be welcoming Professor Ellen Heitzer from the Institute of Human Genetics, Medical University of Graz, Austria, for a guest talk hosted by Johann de Bono. Professor Heitzer is internationally recognised and is a committee member of the European Liquid Biopsy Society (ELBS) where she advocates for the standardisation and guidelines of LB approaches to enable widespread clinical use.

The seminar will be entitled: ‘Whole-Genome Sequencing of ctDNA: One Assay, Multiple Applications’. Professor Heitzer leads the Research Unit for Liquid Biopsies for Personalised Medicine in Cancer, where her group develops techniques to analyse circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA). Her talk will explore how a single whole-genome sequencing dataset from a blood sample can reveal multiple layers of information about a tumour. It is a comprehensive and largely tumor-agnostic approach to liquid biopsy analysis. She will cover copy-number changes, nucleosome positioning and DNA fragmentation patterns, and how they support cancer detection, treatment monitoring and the assessment of minimal residual disease.

Everyone is welcome; the talk will be taking place in the BLB Lecture Theatre from 11:00 to 12:00.