Dr Patricia Jaaks

Staff Scientist

Within the Translational Cancer Genomics group, Patricia works on large-scale combination drug screens in cancer cell lines to establish a combination drug screen analysis framework and to identify novel cancer therapies and genetic biomarkers of synergy.

Patricia’s expertise is in molecular cell biology, cancer genetics, high-throughput chemical screens and anti-cancer therapeutics. She is experienced in laboratory work and computational analysis of large-scale drug screening data.

Patricia is passionate about translational cancer research and her research is driven by the desire to improve our understanding of cancer biology and genetics in order to develop new anti-cancer therapeutics.

Since 2016, Patricia is part of the Translational Cancer Genomics team of Dr Garnett at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Patricia leads the generation and analysis of large scale drug combination data sets. She has established a robust framework to evaluate drug interactions of two-drug combinations screening in pan-cancer (>750 cancer cell lines) and tissue-specific (breast, colorectal and pancreas) settings.

Patricia drives several international academic collaborations. Furthermore, she heads a collaboration with the pharmaceutical partner AstraZeneca to develop clinically relevant drug combinations and biomarkers.

In her PhD at the Children’s Hospital Zurich (Switzerland) Patricia worked on the paediatric sarcoma rhabdomyosarcoma. Importantly, she found that the proprotein convertase furin is required to maintain the viability of alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma cells.

My timeline

• Staff Scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute

• Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wellcome Sanger Institute

• PhD, University of Zurich, Switzerland and University Children's Hospital Zurich, Switzerland

• MSc Molecular Medicine, Imperial College London, UK

• BSc Molecular Life Sciences, University of Hamburg, Germany