Jonas Demeulemeester

Jonas obtained his Master’s in Biochemistry from KU Leuven in 2009. He subsequently combined his PhD in Retroviral Integration & Drug Discovery in the lab of dr. Zeger Debyser with a second Master’s in Bioinformatics. In 2015, he joined the Cancer Genomics team of dr. Peter Van Loo at the Francis Crick Institute in London, UK, where he has leveraged machine learning on large-scale ‘omics data to reveal insights into tumour evolution and heterogeneity. Jonas has developed methods to identify novel tumour suppressors and biallelic mutations in cancer genomes, as well as approaches to address gene expression and DNA methylation confounders in bulk sequencing data. His contributions to the TRACERx study have helped reveal the interplay between genome, DNA methylation and transcriptome during lung cancer evolution and under immune selection. His work on clustered mutational events in the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project is featured in the consortium’s flagship paper. Since 2022, Jonas heads the Integrative Cancer Genomics lab at the VIB – KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology and the KU Leuven Department of Oncology. His team focuses on combining single-molecule and single-cell multi-omics analyses to provide a comprehensive functional understanding of somatic evolution and tumour heterogeneity.