Women's Cancer Initiation and Evolution Group

The Martins group is a translational laboratory that works across all women’s cancers (with special focus in ovarian cancer) and brings clinically relevant questions to the bench and translates molecular findings into improvements in the care of women’s cancers. We base our discoveries on evolutionary/Darwinian principles and we use molecular pathology and genomic cut-edging techniques to assess cells individually and in the context of distinct selective pressures, influenced by surrounding cell context and microenvironment.

Focus - The team focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms that lead to cancer initiation and progression with the ultimate aim of developing:

Biomarkers for early detection and drug response

Better personalized prevention and targeted treatment strategies

The team works across all women’s cancers (with special focus in ovarian cancer) since they have previously demonstrated that some of the cancer molecular drivers and genomic dependencies are shared across different cancers.

Team - The team is diverse, composed of life sciences and natural sciences scientists, bioinformaticians, and clinicians, such as surgeons, pathologists, oncologists, and geneticists. They collaborate with other teams with complementary expertise.

Filipe Correia Martins - Short Biography

Filipe Correia Martins is a Clinical Associate Professor and a Consultant Surgeon in Gynaecological Oncology. He graduated from Medical School (2006) from University of Coimbra, Portugal. He did a MSc in Experimental Pathology before being selected for a competitive PhD Gulbenkian programme created to train clinician scientists (2008-2012). His PhD work was supervised by Prof. Kornelia Polyak (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School). He then moved to Cambridge, where he did his clinical training whilst doing post-doctoral research as a NIHR-funded Academic Clinical Fellow (2013-2015), an Academic Clinical Lecturer (Experimental Medicine Initiative; University of Cambridge/Astrazeneca 2016-2020) and a Crick Postdoctoral clinical fellow (2018-2019), under the supervision of Prof. James Brenton and Prof. Charles Swanton, respectively. Dr. Correia Martins is the RCS/BGCS Subspecialty Lead for Gynaecological Oncology, the chief investigator for the TARGET-FAL01 study and the co-lead for the NEMO Consortium.