The Center consists of four research groups led by Lauri Aaltonen (director of the CoE, Tumor Genomics, University of Helsinki), Jussi Taipale (Medical Systems Biology, University of Helsinki), Matti Nykter (Computational Biology, University of Tampere), and Janne Pitkäniemi (Cancer Epidemiology, Finnish Cancer Registry).
Tumors are a challenging disease group as every single case is unique due to the combination of the persons own genome, the tumor genomes formed by the accumulation of mutations over time, and environmental factors. Rapid advances in technologies continue to produce new data and opportunities towards novel scientific breakthroughs.
The aim of this Center of Excellence is to improve the understanding of the functions of the genome and to bring genomic medicine into practice. This will be achieved by taking advantage of existing public data and creating and analyzing new key datasets from selected patient populations, identified using unique Finnish registries that allow population-scale data mining.