Peter Van Loo

Peter Van Loo is a Winton Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute in recognition of the Winton Charitable Foundation's generous donation towards the institute.

During his postdoctoral training at the University of Oslo, the University of Leuven, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, he developed computational techniques to study copy-number alterations in cancer genomes, and approaches to study the evolutionary history and subclonal architecture of tumors from whole-genome sequencing data, a field coined “molecular archeology of cancer”.

Peter’s research at the Francis Crick Institute leverages massively parallel sequencing efforts to study cancer genes, mutational processes in cancer, and tumor evolution. His work has sketched the typical evolutionary trajectories of many cancer types, allowing insight into the timelines of cancer development, as well as insight into how tumors metastasize.

He is the main lead of the Evolution and Heterogeneity working group of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) initiative, and the genomics lead of the Sarcoma arm of the 100,000 Genomes Project.

Peter has been awarded a Cancer Research UK Future Leaders in Cancer Research Prize in 2015 and a VIB Alumni Award in 2017.