PhD Student in Cancer Research @ TOBI Lab (CRIG - UGent - VIB)

The Translational Onco-genomics and Bio-Informatics lab (TOBI-lab), headed by Prof. Katleen De Preter, at the VIB-UGent is seeking a biomedical researcher with expertise and interest in translational cancer research. 

Omics based strategies, such as (epi-)genomics and transcriptomics, are opening unprecedented potential for developing novel precision oncology tools for improved diagnosis, prognosis and therapy response prediction of cancer patients. Liquid biopsies are now offering a great potential for minimally-invasive exploration of circulating tumor nucleic acids and cells. However, some questions remain unanswered to grasp the full potential of circulating nucleic acids (cfDNA/cfRNA) in clinicopathologic applications.

The new PhD student will work on a project that aims to obtain further understanding on the origin of nucleic acids that are shed in liquid biopsies, such as blood, using cancer models (mouse and rat) and patient samples of neuroblastoma disease, a rare childhood cancer. Nucleic acids in both tissue and liquid biopsy samples will be investigated. Examples of techniques that will be used in this PhD project include DNA/RNA isolation, DNA/RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, qPCR, digital PCR, amongst others. Sequencing data analysis will be done using data analysis pipelines (Python, R) on the high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure.