dr. Mattias Van Heetvelde (PhD)

Currently I am mainly active as a bioinformatician in the lab of prof. Elfride De Baere, who focuses on inherited retinal disorders and other developmental diseases. I also provide data analysis support for long-read sequencing and transcriptome-wide alternative splicing in the Lab for cancer predisposition and precision oncology (prof. Claes). My role consists of building pipelines for data analysis and aiding with data interpretation. Until 2019, I studied the role of small non-coding RNAs in somatic inactivation of BRCA1 and BRCA2 during my PhD in prof. Kathleen Claes’ lab. 
 

• Research Staff – Center for Medical Genetics Ghent; present
• PhD Fellowship – IWT scholarship; Center for Medical Genetics Ghent; Defended in June 2019 
• Master Bioscience engineering: Cell and gene biotechnology; Ghent University; Graduated with distinction in September 2013
   

• 'Prevalence of germline pathogenic variants in cancer predisposing genes in Czech and Belgian pancreatic cancer patients.' Cancer, 2021 (PMID: 34503238)
• ‘Accurate detection and quantification of (epi-)genetic second hits in BRCA1/2- associated hereditary breast and ovarian cancer reveals multiple co-acting second hits.’ Cancer Letters, 2018 (PMID: 29580810) 
• ‘Prediction of Breast and Prostate Cancer Risks in Male BRCA1 and BRCA2 Mutation Carriers Using Polygenic Risk Scores. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 2017 (PMID: 28448241) 
• ‘Mutational spectrum in a worldwide study of 29,700 families with BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations.’ Human Mutation, 2018 (PMID: 29446198)
• ‘Identification of 12 new susceptibility loci for different histotypes of epithelial ovarian cancer.’ Nat. Genetics, 2017 (PMID: 28346442)
   

• Lab address: Center for Medical Genetics, Medical Research Building 2, Ghent University Hospital (entrance 38), Corneel Heymanslaan 10, 9000 Gent, Belgium
• Center for Medical Genetics Ghent
• Website Lab Claes
• LinkedIn