About
Tim’s research interests are focused on understanding the molecular changes that occur as cancers develop and evade destruction by our immune system. His goal is to apply these findings to enable earlier diagnosis and more effective therapy.
Tim’s group has made several important contributions, including the discovery that APOBEC3 enzymes (part of our innate immune response to viral infection) cause oncogenic driver mutations, thus directly contributing to cancer development. He has recently made further key contributions to this field, identifying a new mechanism for APOBEC3A regulation in squamous epithelia and developing a transgenic model in which the solitary mouse Apobec3 gene has been replaced with the entire 7-gene human APOBEC3 locus.
Tim's group also helped to clarify the role of human papillomavirus (HPV) infection in head and neck cancer causation and prognosis and developed a computational tool (MethylCIBERSORT), to allow estimation of the different cell types present in the tumour microenvironment using DNA methylation data from bulk tumour samples.
Continuing his interests in the pathogenesis of HPV-associated cancer, Tim recently led a collaborative team from centres in the UK, Austria and Norway to conduct the largest multi-omics analysis of cervical cancer to-date, identifying two disease subgroups with differing prognosis. Work to interrogate the differences between these tumour subgroups at the single cell resolution continues in his lab.