Where does human disease begin,
and how does it evolve?
Our lab combines human genetics and molecular biology to study human diseases.
Our goal is to understand the genetic causes of disease, the biological mechanisms behind it,
and how disease evolves, and to apply our discoveries to better therapies.
Right now, we focus on somatic mosaicism, genetic changes that arise in only some of a person's cells,
and on the tissue environment around those cells, which together give rise to many diseases.
Disease areas
We start with the brain, and we look for the origin of disease wherever genetics can show it.
Brain tumors
Malignant tumors such as glioma: which cells they start from, how they grow, and how they change under pressure.
Neurodegenerative disease
Progressive loss of neurons in the brain: where it begins, how it spreads, and what marks its stages.
Other human diseases
Diseases in other tissues whose origin can be traced through genetic changes in patient samples.
Our work so far
We identified the cellular origin of IDH-mutant glioma, a malignant brain tumor (Park et al., Science, 2026). With our collaborators, we built a portable device that detects the mutation on site (Jung et al., Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 2026).
What we ask next
- Why do some mutated cells lead to disease, while others do not?
- How can these discoveries become diagnostics and therapies?
- How do we bring our device into the clinic, together with our collaborators?
From bedside to bench, and back
We aim for translational research as a continuous loop.
Patients raise the questions, the lab answers them, and what we learn returns to patients.
Bedside to bench
Patient samples and clinical questions decide what we study in the lab.
Bench to bedside
What we find in the lab is carried back toward better diagnosis and therapy.
Many approaches, working in harmony
Spatial analysis, cell biology, disease evolution, animal models and translation are not separate steps in our lab.
What we see in patient tissue shapes our experiments in models,
and what we learn in models guides what we look for in patients.
Spatial context
Where a cell sits in a tissue shapes what it does. We map gene activity across human tissue sections.
Cellular heterogeneity and change
Cells in one tissue differ from each other and change over time. Multiomics reads these differences in fine detail.
Disease evolution
Comparing early and late states shows where a disease comes from and how it progresses.
Model systems (in vivo)
Preclinical mouse models let us test what we see in patients and follow cause and effect.
Translation to patient impact
Findings return to the clinic as candidates for new therapies and diagnostic tests.