Samuel Aparicio, BM, BCh, PhD, FRCPath, FRSC

Lab Groups & Research Areas

Cancer

Honors & Achievements

• Elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2016
• Distinguished University Scholar at the UBC
• Published in scientific and clinical journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, and The New England Journal of Medicine

Dr. Samuel Aparicio (BM, BCh, PhD, FRCPath, FRSC) is Senior Scientific Director of Cancer Genomics at the New York Genome Center (NYGC). The emphasis of his collaborative work with the NYGC is focused on single cell and spatial genomics, computational cancer genomics, and technology development. He serves as the chair of the NYGC’s Enabling Innovation Scientific Working Group.

Dr. Aparicio is the Nan & Lorraine Robertson Chair in Breast Cancer Research at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. He is also Head of the Department of Breast and Molecular Oncology at BC Cancer Research, part of the Provincial Health Services Authority, and a Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UBC.

Dr. Aparicio is renowned for his study of the genomics of single cells to understand tumor evolution. He most recently conducted foundational work on methods for studying the evolution of human cancers using next-generation sequencing approaches and single cell sequencing methods. He is also working to develop quantitative measures of clonal fitness in patients, including methods for single cell genome sequencing and patient derived xenograft models of human cancer. His work on the molecular taxonomy of breast cancer from the genome led to identification of new subtypes and genetic drivers of breast cancer through co-leadership of the Molecular Taxonomy of Breast Cancer International Consortium (METABRIC). His group has defined the genetic and clonal structure of triple negative breast cancers, a hard-to-treat subtype that exhibits extreme genomic diversity.

Dr. Aparicio was a co-founder of Paradigm Therapeutics (now, Takeda Cambridge) and currently Contextual Genomics Ltd. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2016 and is honored with being a Distinguished University Scholar at the UBC. His contributions to academic research have been widely published in scientific and clinical journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Aparicio graduated in medical and natural sciences from Cambridge University (UK), clinical medicine from Oxford, and subsequently in internal medicine and pathology. After doctoral work with Sydney Brenner in Cambridge, he held a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship at the Wellcome/CRUK Developmental Biology Institute. From 2000-2005, he was a senior investigator in the Department of Oncology, Cambridge. He was a co-leader of the international consortium that sequenced the genome of the pufferfish Fugu rubripes in 2002. Dr. Aparicio moved to Vancouver in 2005.