Michael Stratton is Deputy Director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger
Institute, where he is Head of the Cancer Genome Project, and is
Professor of Cancer Genetics at the Institute of Cancer Research. He
qualified in medicine at Oxford University and Guys Hospital, trained
as a histopathologist at the Hammersmith and Maudsley Hospitals and
obtained a PhD in the molecular biology of cancer at the Institute of
Cancer Research. His research interests have been in the genetics of
cancer. He led the group that mapped and identified the high risk
breast cancer susceptibility gene, BRCA2. More recently he has found
moderate risk breast cancer susceptibility genes such as CHEK2, ATM,
BRIPand PALB2as well as genes for skin, testis, colorectal, thyroid,
and childhood cancers. At the Cancer Genome Project he conducts high
throughput, systematic genome-wide searches for somatic mutations in
human cancer in order to identify new cancer genes, to understand
processes of mutagenesis in human cancers and to reveal the role of
genome structure in determining abnormalities of cancer genomes. These
studies have led to the discovery of activating somatic mutations in
the BRAFand ERBB2genes in melanoma and lung cancer respectively and
have described basic patterns of somatic mutation in cancer genomes. He
was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008.
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