Dr Tim Fenton

Tim is an Associate Professor in Cancer Biology at the School of Cancer Sciences / Centre for Cancer Immunology and a member of the Institute for Life Sciences at the University of Southampton. Having completed his PhD working on mTOR/S6 kinase signalling with Prof Ivan Gout at UCL in 2005, he joined Prof Webster Cavenee’s group at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, the University of California San Diego, where he identified a mechanism that renders brain tumour cells resistant to drugs targeting the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor. In 2011 Tim returned to the UK, working in Prof Chris Boshoff’s CRUK Viral Oncology laboratory at UCL Cancer Institute before starting his own group with funding from the Rosetrees Trust. In 2017 he took up a faculty position in the School of Biosciences at the University of Kent, co-organising the BACR Response and Resistance meetings in 2018 and 2021 before moving to Southampton in January 2022.

Contributions from Tim’s group include discovering that APOBEC3 enzymes (part of our innate immune response to viral infection) cause oncogenic driver mutations, thus directly contributing to cancer development. His group also helped to clarify the role of human papillomavirus infection in head and neck cancer causation and prognosis and developed a widely used computational tool (MethylCIBERSORT) to allow estimation of the different cell types present in the tumour microenvironment using DNA methylation data from bulk tumour samples. Tim’s current research is focused on understanding the regulation and function of APOBEC3 genes and on the genomics of HPV-associated cancers. 
 

Connect with Tim:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• ORCID
• University of Southampton

« Back