Kathleen Claes
- Full Professor
- Head of the Cancer Predisposition and Precision Oncology lab
Contact
Campus UZ, C. Heymanslaan 10, MRB1 (entrance 34), 9000 Ghent
E-mail I LinkedIn | UGent Research Explorer | ORCID
Personalia
Biography
- 2009 - present: Professor - Ghent University
- 1997 - 2011: Postdoc - Ghent University
- 2003: PhD - Ghent University
- 1996: Master Bioscience Engineering - Ghent University
Fun fact
During my Erasmus period in Nottingham, I was a member of the university rugby team. I was selected because of my “running capacities”. Unfortunately, the rules were very complicated and I missed some other talents to become a good rugby player.
Member of
- CRIG
- Consortium of Investigators of Modifiers of BRCA1/2 (CIMBA)
- ENIGMA consortium
- European Reference Network for rare genetic tumour risk sundromes (ERN-Genturis)
- European association for Cancer Research (EACR)
- Board member European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG)
- EMQN CIC Scientific and Strategic Advisory Board (SSAB)
Research tracks
Expertise
The combination of supervising the laboratory of genome diagnostics and a research position, is an ideal starting point to build translational research. I aim to contribute to prevention, early diagnosis and treatment of cancer by focusing on germline cancer predisposition – with a major interest in gynecological, pancreatic and pediatric cancers and patients with immune deficiencies. I am triggered by the opportunities of liquid biopsies for early detection of cancer and therapy monitoring. To study DNA repair mechanisms, zebrafish is turned out to be a good model organism. I love multidisciplinary collaborations and approaches.
Publications
Key publications
- Identification of potentially actionable genetic variants in epithelial ovarian cancer : a retrospective cohort study. (2004) NPJ Precis. Oncol.
- Zebrafish avatars : toward functional precision medicine in low-grade serous ovarian cancer. (2024) Cancers
- Atm deficient zebrafish model reveals conservation of the tumour suppressor function and a role in fertility. (2023) Genes. Dis.
- Prevalence of germline pathogenic variants in cancer predisposing genes in Czech and Belgian pancreatic cancer patients. (2021) OncoDot.3 symposium
- Somatic mosaics in hereditary tumor predisposition syndromes. (2021) Eur. J. Med. Genet.
- Dealing with pseudogenes in molecular diagnostics in the next-generation sequencing era. (2014) Methods Mol. Biol.
- Comparison of microsatellite instability detection by immunohistochemistry and molecular techniques in colorectal and endometrial cancer. (2021) Sci. Rep.
- Accurate detection and quantification of epigenetic and genetic second hits in BRCA1 and BRCA2-associated hereditary breast and ovarian cancer reveals multiple co-acting second hits. (2018) Cancer Lett.
- Shallow whole-genome sequencing of plasma cell-free DNA accurately differentiates small from non-small cell lung carcinoma. (2020) Genome Med.
- A case-only study to identify genetic modifiers of breast cancer risk for BRCA1/BRCA2 mutation carriers. (2021) Nat. Commun.