Darell Doty Bigner

About

Darell Doty Bigner is the E. L. and Lucille F. Jones Cancer Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Medicine at Duke University. He holds multiple titles including Professor of Neurosurgery, Professor of Surgery, and Professor of Pathology. He serves as the Chief of the Division of Experimental Pathology and is a member of the Duke Cancer Institute. His professional roles indicate a focus on cancer research, experimental pathology, and neurosurgery, contributing to the advancement of knowledge in these fields through his leadership and research activities at Duke.

Research topics

• Biology
• Genetics
• Computational biology
• Cancer research
• Evolutionary biology
• Internal medicine
• Oncology
• Medicine
• Immunology
• Computer Science

Selected publications

• The repertoire of mutational signatures in human cancer

  Nature · 2020 · 3673 citations

  , enabled the discovery of new signatures, the separation of overlapping signatures and the decomposition of signatures into components that may represent associated-but distinct-DNA damage, repair and/or replication mechanisms. By estimating the contribution of each signature to the mutational catalogues of individual cancer genomes, we revealed associations of signatures to exogenous or endogenous exposures, as well as to defective DNA-maintenance processes. However, many signatures are of unk…

  DOI

• Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

  Nature · 2020 · 3248 citations

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  DOI

• The evolutionary history of 2,658 cancers

  Nature · 2020 · 1112 citations

  , we reconstruct the life history and evolution of mutational processes and driver mutation sequences of 38 types of cancer. Early oncogenesis is characterized by mutations in a constrained set of driver genes, and specific copy number gains, such as trisomy 7 in glioblastoma and isochromosome 17q in medulloblastoma. The mutational spectrum changes significantly throughout tumour evolution in 40% of samples. A nearly fourfold diversification of driver genes and increased genomic instability are…

  DOI

• Patterns of somatic structural variation in human cancer genomes

  Nature · 2020 · 976 citations

  . Sixteen signatures of structural variation emerged. Deletions have a multimodal size distribution, assort unevenly across tumour types and patients, are enriched in late-replicating regions and correlate with inversions. Tandem duplications also have a multimodal size distribution, but are enriched in early-replicating regions-as are unbalanced translocations. Replication-based mechanisms of rearrangement generate varied chromosomal structures with low-level copy-number gains and frequent inve…

  DOI

• Comprehensive analysis of chromothripsis in 2,658 human cancers using whole-genome sequencing

  Nature Genetics · 2020 · 763 citations

  Chromothripsis is a mutational phenomenon characterized by massive, clustered genomic rearrangements that occurs in cancer and other diseases. Recent studies in selected cancer types have suggested that chromothripsis may be more common than initially inferred from low-resolution copy-number data. Here, as part of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), we analyze patterns of chromothrips…

  DOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R37CA011898

  NIH · $12.4M · 2013

• NIH Grant P01CA15429101A1

  NIH · $3.3M · 2017

• NIH Grant P50NS02002329

  NIH · $2.5M · 2014

Frequent coauthors

• C. Hawkins

  University of Portsmouth

  1401 shared

• Stefan M. Pfister

  University Hospital Heidelberg

  1316 shared

• James T. Rutka

  Hospital for Sick Children

  1279 shared

• Diane K. Birks

  1225 shared

• William A. Weiss

  1055 shared

• D. Picard

  1050 shared

• N. Foreman

  1050 shared

• P. Lichter

  Heidelberg University

  1050 shared

Awards & honors

• E. L. and Lucille F. Jones Cancer Distinguished Research Pro…

Similar researchers at Duke University

• Andrew Serghios Barbash-35
• Peter Allenh-28
• Ryan M Antielh-26