Sebastian Nijman

Functional cancer genomics

Sebastian Nijman's research is focused on understanding how drugs work in the complex context of genetic heterogeneity, and the identification of novel drug targets for cancer therapy. To achieve this they employ various functional genomic screening and systems biology approaches.

Biosketch

Sebastian is an associate member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Oxford, Director of Functional Genomics at the Target Discovery Institute and adjunct Principal Investigator at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. I am also an elected member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

He studied Medical Biology at the University of Utrecht and received his Ph.D. at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in 2005 in the group of René Bernards. During his PhD je performed the first RNAi screen in human cells and worked on the functional annotation of ubiquitin proteases, which since then have emerged as a new drug target class. He was a postdoctoral fellow at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in the laboratory of Todd Golub and started his own group in 2007 in Vienna at CeMM. Here, they discovered the first mechanism of resistance to PI3K/mTOR inhibitors and developed isogenic cell models to discover novel drug-gene interactions. In November 2014, he joined the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Oxford where he will continue to work on these topics.

Selected Papers

Nijman SM, Friend SH. Cancer. Potential of the synthetic lethality principle. Science. 2013 Nov 15;342(6160):809-11. (abstract)

Bürckstümmer T, Banning C, Hainzl P, Schobesberger R, Kerzendorfer C, Pauler FM, Chen D, Them N, Schischlik F, Rebsamen M, Smida M, Fece de la Cruz F, Lapao A, Liszt M, Eizinger B, Guenzl PM, Blomen VA, Konopka T, Gapp B, Parapatics K, Maier B, Stöckl J, Fischl W, Salic S, Taba Casari MR, Knapp S, Bennett KL, Bock C, Colinge J, Kralovics R, Ammerer G, Casari G, Brummelkamp TR, Superti-Furga G, Nijman SM. A reversible gene trap collection empowers haploid genetics in human cells. Nat Methods. 2013 Oct;10(10):965-71.. (abstract)

Muellner MK, Uras IZ, Gapp BV, Kerzendorfer C, Smida M, Lechtermann H, Craig-Mueller N, Colinge J, Duernberger G, Nijman SM. A chemical-genetic screen reveals a mechanism of resistance to PI3K inhibitors in cancer. Nat Chem Biol. 2011 Sep 25;7(11):787-93. (abstract)