Inga Reynisdóttir

1993                   PhD, Columbia University, New York City, USA
1993 – 1994       Post-doctoral research at Columbia University, New York City, USA
1994 – 1997       Post-doctoral research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York City, USA
1997 – 2002       Project leader and head of Metabolic division, Population Genomics, deCode genetics, Reykjavik, Iceland
2002 – 2007       Division head/Molecular Biology, Drug Discovery, deCode genetics, Reykjavik, Iceland
2008 – present   Clinical scientist, Pathology Dept., Landspitali – The National University Hospital of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland  
2017                   Received the entitlement ´Clinical Professor´ from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Iceland
 

Inga leads a research team, in collaboration with Dr. Rósa Björk Barkardóttir, at the Cell biology and molecular genetics unit at the Department of Pathology at the Landspitali – University Hospital.  The focus is on understanding how alterations in the genome can play a role in disease generation andprogression, particularly in cancer. Not only can single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) increase the risk of cancer but genomic rearrangements such as amplifications can harbor genes that promote tumor initiation andgrowth. Our approach has been to identify genetic alterations in breast cancer patients and/or tumors, relating them to changes in gene expression and to pathological and clinical factors in addition to validating the effect in cell-based assays.  

Our aim is to find changes in gene expression and/or genetic alterations that will be useful for future prognosis, diagnosis and as therapeutic targets. A well-known example is the HER2 gene, used for diagnosis of breast tumors and a drug target. Previously we reported the association of a SNP with a known risk to breast cancer with reduced survival in estrogen receptor positive patients. We also mapped copy number alterations on chromosome 8 in breast tumors, describing the correlation between amplification and high gene expression of ZNF703 with shorter survival in patients that carry luminal B breast tumors.

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